Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew bring the Talking Heads’ ‘Remain in Light’ to Toronto

There’s no place like Rome.

For Jerry Harrison and guitar lion Adrian Belew, a show they performed in the Italian capital in 1980 during the Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light” tour served as the catalyst for the duo’s own “Remain in Light” concert series that stops at the Danforth Music Hall on Thursday.

Harrison, the seminal New York new wave band’s guitarist and keyboardist, was producing a 2014 film about Memphis music called “Take Me to the River” and often visited Nashville-based Belew, the eventual King Crimson guitarist who played on that 1980 tour.

“Adrian and I would see each other at least once a year and we always remarked about a YouTube stream of the Talking Heads playing in 1980 in Rome that was fabulous,” Harrison recalled recently over the phone. “There was just something very special about the show and that particular night. And Adrian said, ‘My audience on Instagram tells me that they get the most joy out of that show.’

“So we thought that we should recreate this.”

The original intention was to stage it throughout 2020 — the actual 40th anniversary of “Remain in Light” — but the pandemic had other plans.

When they were finally able to produce the show, they played once in 2021 and three 2022 gigs — Sarasota, Fla., Los Angeles and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco — and were encouraged by the response.

“We played an amazing show at Hardly Strictly to 55,000 people and they were just ecstatic,” said Harrison. “People were so happy and excited, it was great. So we decided to tour.”

“Remain in Light” remains a creative milestone in the Talking Heads catalogue; one with a significant GTA connection that focused on the explosive creativity of Harrison, guitarist and singer David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz at the turn of the ’80s.

Establishing themselves as influencers with their first three works — “Talking Heads: 77,” 1978’s “More Songs About Buildings and Food” and 1979’s “Fear of Music” — it was 1980’s “Remain in Light” that found the quartet deciding to expand their live presence into a 10-piece band.

And the place where they debuted that new sound?

Heatwave, the last rock festival assembled by Toronto promoter John Brower of Rock and Roll Revival and Strawberry Fields fame before he retired from the game.

Held at Mosport Park near Bowmanville on Aug. 23, 1980, Heatwave lasted 12 hours and included Arkitex, Teenage Head, B.B. Gabor, Holly and the Italians, Dave Edmunds’ Rockpile with Nick Lowe, the Rumour (minus Graham Parker), the B-52’s, the Pretenders, Elvis Costello and the Attractions and — to close the show — Hamilton’s the Kings.

The Talking Heads followed the B-52’s with an expanded roster of monster players including Belew; Labelle singer Nona Hendryx; Sharks and Albert King bassist Busta “Cherry” Jones; Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell; percussionist Steve Scales; and the Police and Sting background singer Dolette McDonald.

They debuted the “Remain in Light” songs “Once in a Lifetime,” “Houses in Motion,” “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” and “Crosseyed and Painless.”

So what does Harrison remember about Heatwave?

“I remember that Elvis Costello waited an hour after we finished to let the audience cool down,” recalled Harrison (the event was Costello and the Attractions’ only North American concert that year).”And then he came out and played acoustically to change the mood before he went electric.

“I also remember it was a hot day and we were fortunate enough to play as the sun went down. People had been there all afternoon with these fantastic acts like the Pretenders and the B-52’s, and then we came out and there was this sort of grand surprise, and the audience reacted so positively. You know, it really set our whole course.

“We had only planned to do the show twice: it was an experiment to see how it would go with a big band. And I think after that night, because the audience’s reaction was so over the top, that we just said, ‘There’s no question, this is what we have to do.’

“Then we did two successive tours; the last one that would go on to be immortalized in (the concert film and album) ‘Stop Making Sense.’”

Harrison said “Remain in Light” — produced by Brian Eno and heavily influenced by African rhythms — was created with no advance preparation and took its cue from the “Fear of Music” track “I Zimbra.”

“‘Remain in Light’ was our most adventuresome album,” Harrison said. “We went into the studio purposefully not having written any of the songs because we had this desire to capture the first time someone had played something.

“We would have these rehearsal tapes from previous records and sometimes there would be an innocence that, as you played it more, got more professional. That innocence or sense of exploration was something we wanted to capture in a recording. The only the way to do it was to not prepare.”

For the current tour, seven-member band Cool Cool Cool, which includes members of defunct Brooklyn funk band Turkuaz, will fill the expanse initially covered by the Talking Heads supergroup for a set list that will include the majority of “Remain in Light,” some other classics and a few surprises that Harrison said are geared to “maximum danceability.”

“We never did a tour where we did the whole album,” he said. “When we set out to do this, it was more about matching the feeling or the vibe of the show in Rome, which was not the whole record. So it’s more based on that.

“I could imagine that we could play the album on this tour because we’re doing a lot of theatres, but … we want to keep people dancing. Songs like ‘The Overload and ‘Listening Wind’ — which I think are fantastic songs — they need concert hall environments. But in an environment where you want people to be getting out of their seats and dancing, it’s all about keep the energy moving.”

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