I Will Find a City

CBGB, the legendarily seedy club in the Bowery neighbourhood of New York City that became the home of US punk rock and new wave in the mid-1970s, fascinated me from an early age. At high school, I would skip gym class to hide in the library devouring Lester Bangs’s music criticism and Please Kill Me, the oral history of US punk edited by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil. Most of the dramatis personae in McCain and McNeil’s account have long since been rewarded with cultural canonisation, membership in the Rock Hall of Fame, and spots at the top of critics’ lists of the most important albums/singles/bands, but Talking Heads were, to my mind, the best of the bunch. They were never as propulsive as the Ramones, as feral as the Dead Boys, or as decadent as the Heartbreakers. They were not shamanistic like Patti Smith or glamorous like Blondie. And they lacked Television’s doomy romanticism or the Voidoids’ scuzzy nihilism. What Talking Heads brought to the CBGB’s eclectic scene was an idiosyncratic and uniquely angular intellect.