There are two places to see a band at London’s O2. The 20,000 capacity O2 Arena is the one everyone knows about. Oxygen is available for the seats at the back where the rake is so steep the tickets actually carry disclaimers for vertigo sufferers. The other one, The O2 Indigo is less well known. It’s the smaller sibling of the two performance spaces that were hewn out of the structure following a post millennium makeover that turned it into what it should have been all along. Tonight in the Arena, a live recording of Kill Tony, the allegedly funny US comedy podcast is taking place. Meanwhile, the Indigo is hosting Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew of Talking Heads and King Crimson fame.
As I emerge at North Greenwich tube, I’m in the mix with two very different tribes. They’re each going to one of the two shows and it’s pretty clear which is which. I look around me and to be brutally honest, am reassured and relieved that I’m with the Harrison/Belew crew.
Jerry Harrison, Adrian Belew and Cool Cool Cool @ O2 Indigo, London
The pair are performing their Remain In Light show, which was born in 2022 following the 40th anniversary of Talking Heads’ critically acclaimed fourth album. Three years later, the tour is showing no signs of losing popularity and I’m really excited to be at this, the final date on the 2025 UK and European leg.
Jerry and Adrian are backed by funk, house and R&B ensemble Cool Cool Cool, who themselves are an exceptional nine-piece featuring some outstanding musicians in the genre. We’re fortunate to experience the ‘backing band’ an hour before the main act come out because Cool Cool Cool are actually also the support. Songs such as Made Ya Look, Dynamite and Never Noticed fairly race along with twin vocals from Shira Elias and Sammi Garett soaring over a backdrop of pumping basslines, stabbing horns and Latin percussion. It’s a fabulous warm up for what is to follow.
When the lights dim again, the main event is signalled by a pulsating sequencer that’s banging out bass notes, the majority of which are making my trousers flap. It goes on for some time; so long in fact that an image of the band getting lost backstage, whilst Harrison and Belew shout: “Hello London!” gets stuck in my head and can’t escape.
But soon enough, the members of Cool Cool Cool reappear and they’re shortly followed by the two names above the door. The band open with Psycho Killer, perhaps the best known of all Talking Heads songs. It’s a slight surprise, as (a) you might think they’d save it for the end, and; (b) it’s not on Remain In Light. In fact, the tour nomenclature is a little misleading. Whilst the majority of songs tonight are from the only Talking Heads album that both Harrison and Belew appeared on together, the band do raid the wider discography too.
That said, we don’t wait long for Remain In Light material. Crosseyed And Painless and Houses In Motion follow. They’re both new wave funk masterpieces from what is generally considered Talking Heads’ finest work and they give the now 11-piece band an opportunity to flex every inch of their combined musical muscle.
One thing that immediately stands out is how impressive it is that a band not containing David Byrne can have no less than three singers that sound like David Byrne. Belew kicks the vocals off on Psycho Killer; sounds like David Byrne. Harrison takes up the main vocal on Houses In Motion; sounds like David Byrne. But it’s not until vocalist and baritone sax player Josh Schwartz picks up the reins that the ears really prick up. Bloody hell, he really sounds like David Byrne. His vocals on Crosseyed And Painless and Once In A Lifetime among others are amazingly authentic.
It’s not exclusively Talking Heads material on offer tonight. There’s time for some other songs more personal to both main artists too. Belew leaves the stage whilst Harrison plays Rev It Up from his second solo album Casual Gods. It’s got a great chunky guitar riff and it’s an opportunity for the full horn section to shine. It also allows stage left guitarist Craig Brodhead (who to this point has been a fairly anonymous third wheel) to rip an incredible solo and demonstrate that just like Belew, he is a consummate lead guitar player.
Adrian remains off stage for Slippery People, which is a musical powerhouse featuring the sublime lead vocals of Elias and Garett, a fantastic keys solo from Harrison and a truly epic building tenor sax solo from Greg Sanderson. Whilst this plays out, the other musicians including Harrison sit on stage and extravagantly cross and recross their legs Moulin Rouge style.
When Adrian returns, it’s to play King Crimson’s Thela Hun Ginjeet from the 1981 album Discipline. Belew introduces it as “Something that sounds a little bit different”. To my ears, it sounds broadly similar to be honest. It has brilliant Latin drums and percussion from Mikey Carubba and Yahuba Garcia-Torres respectively and plenty of harmonics and whammy bar/neck bending pyrotechnics from Belew.
It also includes a spoken voice recording, made by Adrian shortly after he was confronted by a 1980’s street gang in Notting Hill: “I couldn’t see his face. He was holding a gun against me and I was thinking: ‘This is a dangerous place’”, says Belew in a masterpiece of understatement. Thela Hun Ginjeet (an anagram of ‘heat in the jungle’, itself a euphemism for urban crime) is what you’d get if you put Talking Heads, King Crimson and Crimewatch UK in a food processor and gave it a spin.
The band are remarkably tight, not only in the impeccable musicianship but also in the coordinated dance moves that accompany the whole performance. During Life During Wartime, they ape the ‘running on the spot’ choreography so brilliantly played out by the frontline of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth (bass), Alex Weir (guitar), Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt (backing vocals) during Stop Making Sense. It must be as knackering as it is technically difficult.
Those around me in the know follow suit and I soon find I’m surrounded by fans manically sprinting whilst not going anywhere. A few really brave souls even copy Byrne’s most extreme workout routine by hareing around at the back of the auditorium. The whole experience is as mad as it is captivating. It helps that the song itself has a hook so catchy that once it gets lodged in your head, the Kray twins would have a job evicting it.
The band close the main set with Al Green’s classic soul tune Take Me To The River, a song that Talking Heads covered on their 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food. It’s another one where the horns and the backing vocalists really shine.
When they come back out, they play Drugs from Fear Of Music, the other Talking Heads album that gets its legs stretched tonight. It’s quite understated compared to everything else we’ve heard, but to be fair the band deserve a rest. They’ve collectively been going at it at 1000mph for the last hour and twenty minutes. The concluding song fittingly is from Remain In Light: The Great Curve. It’s a final up-tempo tour de force for the whole band and just about everybody I see around me is throwing shapes. At this point, if you’re standing up and not at least tapping your feet to it, your shoes must have been nailed to the floor. I can think of no other explanation.
The whole thing builds to a climax with some more of Belew’s face melting guitar and when the music stops and the applause starts, the band meet for a photo call with the audience. It’s the last date of the tour; who wouldn’t want a memento?
The two shows in the O2 tonight terminate at roughly the same time and the separate tribes meet once again as we head to the tube. I hope the Kill Tony crowd had a good time but I’m in no doubt in Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew I picked the right event to be at this evening. We’ve been celebrating music from four decades ago that will still be heralded four decades from now. If Kill Tony is still being talked about in forty years’ time, I’ll eat Adrian’s hat.
Live review of Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew Remain In Light at O2 Indigo, London on 7 June 2025 by Simon Reed. Photography by Musical Pictures.
Share Thing