Remain in Light

When Angélique Kidjo performed Talking Heads’ landmark 1980 album Remain in Light in its entirety onstage at Carnegie Hall last year, the New York Times enthused that she wasn’t toppling an icon so much as ‘dancing on its heights’. If one is not familiar with the original recording, the notion of Kidjo covering a 38-year-old, post-punk new-wave album by a bunch of New York hipsters is an improbable project on the surface. Yet as an exercise in musical cross-pollination between Africa and the US, there is a perfect logic at work: the Talking Heads’ album, produced by Brian Eno, was heavily influenced by the polyrhythms of Afrobeat and so there's a thrilling sense of the music coming full circle. Brilliantly marshalled by producer-to-the-stars Jeff Bhasker (Rihanna, Kanye West and Jay-Z), Kidjo euphorically invests songs such as ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ with explosive percussion from Tony Allen, driving horns courtesy of Antibalas, layered tribal harmonies, Beninese chants and spiralling African guitars. Talking Heads’ main man David Byrne has endorsed the project and no wonder; this dense, dynamic, funk-fuelled masterpiece is surely the album he would have loved to have made all those years ago.