The concert film is back, and could save cinemas. Why can’t we get enough?

If you count a Taylor Swift fan or three among your friends and acquaintances, and chances are you do, you may be aware that her 2023 concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, has been something of a big deal. That’s to put it mildly.

Swift’s self-financed production is already the highest-grossing concert film in history, and its global distribution, without the backing of a film studio, is highly unusual. This distribution model has, in turn, meant a huge cash boost to cinemas still struggling to improve their audience numbers. Swifties have turned cinemas into miniature stadium shows, and the internet has been filled with clips of fans singing, weeping and dancing in the aisles.

The concert film is back, we might say. But as a proxy for the live experience, or as a mode of time-travel to a legendary show or festival, has it ever really gone away?

Beyonce performs during her Renaissance world tour in May in London.Credit: Getty Images

Beyoncé has a new concert film forthcoming, based on the tour for her acclaimed 2022 album Renaissance. Her previous concert film, Homecoming, was a huge hit for the artist and for Netflix: it captured her historic performance at Coachella – in 2018, she was the first Black woman to ever headline the festival – while also doubling as a documentary about the development of her elaborate show, which included a full marching band.

In 2021, Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in New York, became the second concert film to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (The first was Woodstock, in 1970.) Directed by Questlove, founding member of Philadelphia hip-hop group The Roots, Summer of Soul was pieced together from new interviews and 40 hours of original footage of performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and more. Shot for a television special, the tapes had sat neglected for decades.

This month saw the re-release of a concert film often considered by critics and fans to be the best ever made. The late Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, which captured the band Talking Heads at their live peak, is as memorable for its look as its sound. The group’s clever, minimalist stage show – DIY choreography, a great use of shadows, their own clothes – is complemented by Demme and his crew’s fluid camerawork and Lisa Day’s disciplined editing.

The film leaves a vivid and lasting impression without ever trying to overwhelm a viewer. Even if you’ve never seen Stop Making Sense in full you may be able to picture David Byrne, Talking Heads’ hypnotically intense frontman, looming out of the darkness in a cartoonishly oversized suit – a bit of stagecraft that Demme immortalised.

Demme shot Talking Heads over four nights in front of a live audience at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre in December 1983. (He left the audience almost entirely out of the film.) Earlier that year he had offered to film Talking Heads after the meeting the group backstage. With only one completed feature to his name, Melvin and Howard, a 1980 comedy that Talking Heads happened to like, Demme was then a relative unknown. He was still nearly a decade away from the mainstream success and acclaim he would find as the director of Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1993).

David Byrne in a still from Stop Making Sense.Credit: A24 Films

Talking Heads, by contrast, were on the up and up. The group had formed amid New York’s febrile downtown scene in the late 1970s, where punks and early hip-hop MCs traded ideas and Andy Warhol, among other art world superstars, looked on. Patti Smith, The Ramones, Grandmaster Flash, Blondie: an embarrassment of musical riches in a city that was almost bankrupt. By the early 1980s, Talking Heads had swapped roach-infested lofts and grimy clubs for the sun-kissed shores of Nassau, in the Bahamas, where they would record their anxious masterpiece, Remain in Light (1980), and its commercially successful follow-up, Speaking in Tongues (1983).

These albums, and especially the live shows that went with them, marked Talking Heads’ emergence as a multi-racial funk group for a new decade. “Burning Down the House”, the lead single from Speaking in Tongues, hit number nine on the US chart. Its mood and title were inspired by a Parliament-Funkadelic gig that Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth, also a couple, had attended at Madison Square Garden, where the excited crowd struck up a cry of “Burn down the house!”. “There were not a lot of white people in the audience,” Frantz recalled in his 2020 memoir, Remain In Love.

Frantz and Weymouth, under the influence of funk and early hip-hop, had already tasted chart success with their side project Tom Tom Club: their wonderfully naive 1981 single Genius of Love, which would feature in Stop Making Sense, has since been sampled by countless rap groups (and by Mariah Carey). Now the white kids went one better, persuading Parliament’s own brilliant keyboard player, Bernie Worrell, to join Talking Heads’ touring band and complement existing keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison.

Alongside Worrell and the original Talking Heads quartet of Harrison, Frantz, Weymouth and Byrne went funk guitarist Alex Weir, veteran session musician Steve Scales, and gun backing vocalists Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry. These nine players were tight and just a little bit tongue-in-cheek, with a streak of punk oddity preserved in Byrne. He sang like a man just awoken from a bad dream and danced like a wind-up toy. There was little in Talking Heads’ stage show by way of lighting or backdrop to distract a viewer from the group’s performance, and at times, in Demme’s film, they seem to glow in deep space, an eccentric but precise galaxy.

First released in 1984, Stop Making Sense has never fallen out of circulation. Home video and late-night repertory screenings have made it into a bona-fide cult classic. The film was self-financed by Talking Heads – Taylor Swift was not the first musician to have that idea – and the original distribution deal meant that after a certain amount of time, ownership of the film rights reverted to the band.

The new 4K restoration has been done, unlike previous re-releases, from the original film negative. This negative, as restoration supervisor James Mockoski told Rolling Stone magazine in September, was found sitting on a shelf, rather inexplicably, in MGM’s archive, pristine and totally forgotten. (MGM had nothing to do with the film’s original distribution.) The audio, too, has been restored, though Talking Heads had the foresight back in 1983, when Demme shot the film, to transfer the audio tracks onto digital tape in order to preserve them.

A great concert film creates a narrative arc. That’s what lifts it above the countless, straight-to-video live recordings that musicians have too often dumped on the public out of contractual obligation to their record companies. Martin Scorsese achieved it in his magisterial The Last Waltz (1978), which captured the final, epic show by The Band at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in late 1976, and which now feels like a document of an improbably distant era: a fresh-faced Bob Dylan, a resplendent Van Morrison, and The Band’s own Robbie Robertson – to whom Scorsese would dedicate his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon – waxing wry about life on the road.

Director Martin Scorsese (left) and Robbie Robertson at the 31st Cannes International Film Festival in 1978 to present The Last Waltz.Credit: AP

You might nominate your own favourites: among mine would be Amazing Grace (2018), for the slow-building intensity of Aretha Franklin’s gospel performance over two nights in Los Angeles, in 1972. And who, having seen it, could forget the creeping catastrophe of Gimme Shelter (1970), which shows the Rolling Stones-headlined Altamont Free Festival going horribly, violently wrong?

Demme, for his part, didn’t have to create a narrative so much as document one that was already there. Talking Heads’ live show, simple as it was, was drama. Byrne would step on stage alone, with an acoustic guitar and a boom box, to perform “Psycho Killer”, the group’s first single, from 1977 – the first song that Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz ever wrote together, in fact. With each new song, an additional band member would join Byrne, some under their own locomotion, others wheeled onto stage on large risers by a group of black-clad crew members. So a bare venue would gradually be filled with musicians, until the whole ensemble launched into Burning Down the House and the rest of the set travelled like a train at full speed. This was rock show as theatre, and like so many of Talking Heads’ ideas it has had a lasting influence.

Theatrical touches made Stop Making Sense a concert film like no other.Credit: A24 Films

There is another way in which Talking Heads – and Demme’s film – have proved prescient.

Stop Making Sense is justly celebrated for the collective energy it radiates, but the film also pivots around Byrne, an undeniable talent, who has since gone onto a long and polymath career. The scene out of which Talking Heads was born was one of ensembles; now we live in an era of the solo megastar.

Live concerts have become more expensive, more elaborate and, for many audience members, more remote. We can’t get closer to Beyoncé or to Taylor Swift than the length of a stadium, or a cinema seat. They are not galaxies so much as planets, enormous and untouchable.

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