Guitarist/singer Adrian Belew has been busy this year revisiting a pair of key collaborations in a career that has seen him work with some of rock’s biggest stars both on stage and in the studio, while furthering a solo career that is now some two dozen albums deep, playing in the excellent pop band the Bears and perhaps most famously, fronting King Crimson from 1981 to 2009.
First, Belew, who began his career playing with Frank Zappa and went on to work with Paul Simon, Tori Amos and Cyndi Lauper among many others, is teaming up with former Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison to reprise the “Remain In Light” show, which went on the road for an extensive trek in 2023. This time out, there are only a few California dates and a short run in Australia on the books so far.
Named after the Talking Heads’ influential 1980 album, “Remain In Light,” the show finds Belew and Harrison fronting a band that will play that album, which fused the Talking Heads’ earlier quirky rock with African music influences to create a fresh sound that was heavy on rhythms, complex, yet highly approachable, along with some other Taking Heads tunes.
“I love working with Jerry and the band and I love doing that [“Remain In Light”] record [live] in particular,” Belew said. “We’re trying to sort of take as our blueprint the 1980 live Rome concert that’s on YouTube that hundreds and hundreds of people say it’s the best concert they ever saw. We started with that and we tried to emulate it a bit. It’s a show that if you really love that band, you can’t miss it. It’s a happy show, a joyful show.”
After the “Remain In Light” shows, Belew will do an extensive European tour this summer with Beat, the band he formed in 2024 with bassist and fellow King Crimson alumnus Tony Levin, guitarist Steve Vai and Tool drummer Tony Carey to play the music made by the 1980s edition of King Crimson.
Like the Beat project, Belew has a direct connection to the original Talking Heads “Remain In Light” project, having played on the album and served as a featured player in the expanded band the Talking Heads took on tour to promote the album.
Ironically, the first time Belew encountered the Talking Heads, he wasn’t impressed with what he saw.
“I saw the band, the Talking Heads, when they really were nobody yet, in 1977,” he said. “I saw them at a little club, and they weren’t very good, honestly. It’s amazing how quickly they became really good. And in my mind, I compare that show in which I walked away kind of ‘Heh, I don’t know what all the fuss is about’ to what we did only a few years later, three years later, and I think ‘Wow, how quickly they transformed themselves, brilliant stuff. Great players and just completely different musical ideas.
“I remember, there was such a buzz,” Belew added. “You couldn’t go anywhere, a record store, and not just a record store, a restaurant, a book store, wherever you went, they’d be playing something by the Talking Heads.”
Belew said he began to understand how much and how quickly the Talking Heads (which also included singer and main songwriter David Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth) had developed when he heard the band’s third album, 1979’s “Fear Of Music,” which began to introduce an African element into the band’s music.
“That was about the time that I finally ended up playing with them,” Belew said. “Then I went back to the earlier [albums]. But still, ‘Fear Of Music’ was my favorite until we did ‘Remain In Light.’”
The “Remain In Light” album had another Belew connection in that it was produced by Brian Eno. Belew and Eno worked together on David Bowie’s 1979 “Lodger” album, which was produced by Eno. On “Remain In Light,” the producer and the Talking Heads took a similarly unconventional approach to the way “Lodger” was made on “Remain In Light.”
On “Lodger,” Eno didn’t let Belew hear any of the songs he would play on before recording and didn’t even tell him the key of each song. Instead Belew was tasked with playing whatever guitar parts and solos occurred to him the first time he heard the songs.
“That’s exactly what happened with the next thing, which was the ‘Remain In Light’ record with the Talking Heads, the same exact thing, only they didn’t say you can’t hear the songs. There weren’t any songs. There were just tracks and one key,” Belew said. “We’re going to build the songs around stuff, so place something and we’ll build it around you. That’s how (the song) ‘The Great Curve’ was. Go out in the studio and when you think it’s time to put a solo in, go ahead and put it in. And then they would write the song around it later.”
