Précis: band forms, three then four musketeers, acclaim ensues, band works with auteur producer noted for box-transcending approach, frontman/songwriter notes limitations of box, band’s work improves in quantum jumps from album to album and – hey presto – by album number four the band has expanded to a nine-piece and made one of the most extraordinary records ever to be billed as pop music (that’ll be Remain In Light, of course). This is unfortunate because it’s a good story, affording plenty of opportunity for philosophising around the proposition that history is not made by great men. He never explains just what it is that Heads/Club bass player Tina Weymouth did to earn his undying enmity – perhaps she inadvertently snubbed him in the queue for Studio 54 or sat on his cocaine – but Bowman has it in for Weymouth on a cosmic scale, and the resultant petty bitchiness permeates his telling of the Talking Heads story like the taste of milk about to turn.
The author comes across as a kind of Woody Allen caricature of the eighties Manhattan scenester who is convinced not only that New York City is the centre of the known universe but that it is the universe in its entirety, unaware he’s demonstrating precisely the smalltown mentality he so pompously disdains. David Bowman’s Heads biography This Must Be The Place is unintentionally funny to the point of self-parody. But it would be an obscure and cerebral exercise, like one of those novels that only uses one vowel.
It would be possible, in theory, to write about Tom Tom Club without reference to Talking Heads.