robbed hit of the week 7/21/14 - Talking Heads' "And She Was"...

Talking Heads - "And She Was"
from the album Little Creatures (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #54

This week's "robbed hit" comes from a pivotal new wave/modern rock band that were following up their first big pop success. The Talking Heads, a quartet of former art-schoolers led by Brit David Byrne, found themselves with a top-10 single in 1983 with "Burning Down The House" from their fifth studio album Speaking In Tongues. The following year, instead of releasing another studio set, the band put out a film documenting their tour, Stop Making Sense, whose soundtrack companion became one of their longest-lasting sellers to date, even ending up on Rolling Stones best albums of the rock era poll. So by this time the "Heads" were the stars of the art-rock scene.

Maybe it was jarring then for fans to get a first taste of their next album, Little Creatures, which sounded polished, tight, and very mainstream. With enough hooks to hang a gallery, the record seemed predestined to be embraced by pop radio, and the first promo single "Road To Nowhere" became a top-10 hit internationally, while mainly only promoted to rock radio in the US. The second single, "And She Was", sounded like a packaged slice of the Talking Heads sound much in the way that "Love Shack" was for the B-52's a half-decade later. The video, directed by artist Jim Blashfield (who also did the Tears For Fears clip for "Sowing The Seeds Of Love") was a special effects delight in stop motion that clearly influenced the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" the following year...

While "And She Was" almost made the top-10 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, stopping at #11, the single stalled out at #54 on the pop chart in November of 1985. Internationally, the song reached the top-10 in Australia and Ireland, and stopped in the top-20 in New Zealand and the UK, the latter country sending it to #17.

I admit I was pretty shocked when the song wasn't the big pop hit I'd thought it'd be. Perhaps it's better that it's a semi-forgotten treasure (as is the whole album) that I can put on without any sense of fatigue.

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And here's David Byrne by himself performing the song live...