Fear of Music (partially found Warner Records radio spot for Talking Heads' album; 1979)

Fear of Music album cover.

Status: Lost

Talking Heads was a rock band formed in 1975 in New York, becoming one of the most influential bands of the 1980s. Their debut album Talking Heads: 77 was released in 1977 and their three subsequent albums were released year after year. Their third album Fear of Music was released in 1979 and had promotional radio commercials along with it.

Start of Discussion

On December 15, 2010 on the Steve Hoffman forum, user Bass made a discussion asking for audio of a Fear of Music radio commercial. A couple people replied with descriptions and user tedkul linked a SoundCloud podcast, uploaded April 29, 2012 of a discussion between Andy Zax (Producer of every recent Talking Heads reissue) and Jonathan Lethem (Author of the book Fear of Music (33 1/3). Within this podcast were two radio commercials, one for Fear of Music (at 13:16) and Remain in Light (at 14:51, partially talked over). User Dave Marin found a variation of the Remain in Light commercial recorded off of WNEW-FM on October 1980 and uploaded it to YouTube [1] with the Talking Heads YouTube channel uploading both his and the found Fear of Music one in the same video. [2]

Evidence of Existence

A couple people (from the forum and the video) noted that the found Fear of Music commercial sounds different than what they heard. On the forum, user Remain In Light noted that a partial snippet exists in the 1979 South Bank Show Documentary. This was before it was uploaded on YouTube. [3] Within the comments of the video, a few radio stations have been named to have played them, including WABX, WRIF and KISW. On May 19, 2011, Twitter user @LaurieFleming named the New Zealand radio station Radio Active. Also within the comments, user Michael Sheridan claimed that these commercials ran in all FM rock radio markets and claims to have two commercials he had not seen before.