[UPDATE 6/30/21]: After nearly two years of buildup, this weekend’s The Peach Music Festival will host the first-ever running of the Turkuaz tribute to Remain In Light featuring Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew—both of whom can be heard on the original Talking Heads album.
This Turkuaz/Harrison/Belew Remain In Light combo had big plans in store for the album’s 40th anniversary in 2020. Now, the after-midnight show on the Peach Stage on Saturday night, July 3rd, 2021 at Montage Mountain will finally bring the tribute to fruition.
To grab your tickets to see Turkuaz Remain In Light on Saturday night at Peach, head here.
The combo band has a brief run of Remain In Light tour dates set for the remainder of the year. For a full list of dates, see below. For ticketing information, head here. Scroll down to read up on the background behind the collaborative homage and watch the virtual performance they delivered as part of last year’s virtual Bonnaroo streaming event.
[2/2/21] Turkuaz has shared the full video of the band’s virtual “Remain In Light” set featuring former Talking Heads members Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew originally aired as part of Bonnaroo‘s 2020 streaming event, Virtual ROO-ALITY. Along with Talking Heads classics “Psycho Killer”, “Houses In Motion”, “Crosseyed and Painless”, the set features the new Turkuaz track, “Ophidiophobia“, which marks the first-ever studio collaboration between Turkuaz, Harrison, and Belew.
The long, coronavirus-dictated road to this virtual collaboration began with plans to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Talking Heads’ beloved 1980 album, Remain In Light. The idea of Harrison and Belew teaming with the nine-piece funk-rock outfit began to take shape when Jerry and Adrian went to see Turkuaz in action at Nashville’s Exit/In in December of 2019. Upon seeing the band live, Belew shared, “Turkuaz came [to] town to play the Exit/In. Jerry Harrison flew in and he and I went to see the show. It was super funky and joyous! After two songs we looked at each other and said ‘this is gonna work beautifully!’”
Initial practice sessions for the tour quickly proved that theory. “When we started working together, I immediately realized what really great players they were,” Harrison explained. “You can tell that from the records. But when you’re actually in a rehearsal situation, you understand how quickly people pick things up. And if you want to change something, that’s not a problem.”
Harrison also took great pleasure in facilitating the connection between Turkuaz, a “new” band he had produced, and Belew, a longtime collaborator dating back to Talking Heads’ initial Remain In Light tour. Harrison noted, “What a joy it is to be playing music with Adrian Belew again. Having recently produced music for Turkuaz, it was like I was introducing close friends who had never met. We all left the rehearsal very excited.”
In many ways, it seemed Turkuaz was destined to partake in this project. As frontman Dave Brandwein has noted on various occasions, watching Talking Heads’ iconic Stop Making Sense concert film with bassist Taylor Shell while they were in college served as a catalyzing moment. “When Taylor showed me Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads film, that’s really when we decided to start a band,” Brandwein explained in a 2019 Live For Live Music interview. “So all these years, in the back of my mind, they’ve continued to be a huge influence.”
Turkuaz’s own 2019 concert film, None’s A Ton, had seemingly followed a Talking Heads-like artistic sentiment, encapsulating a particular, “colorful” creative period in the band’s evolution. When the film was released in late 2019—ahead of the announcement of the Harrison/Belew collaboration—Brandwein hinted that exciting developments were on the horizon. He explained, “We always approached our live show in ways that I felt create moments and create an art to the set, create cinematic things using choreography. That’s always been sort of our blueprint, and to finally now capture it on film is really gratifying. Having it finally captured this way, it feels like we’re kind of tying a bow on this whole era of the band.”
Turkuaz went on to launch Kuadrochrome, a new EP and a new live-look identity. The abrupt change showcased the outfit’s ability to shift its shape to fit any creative specifications and served to elevate fan excitement when the collaborative Remain In Light tour was announced soon after. The hybrid ensemble was set to play a handful of highly anticipated festival and club dates throughout the summer of 2020, but COVID-19 intervened, effectively nullifying the upcoming tour.
The new track, “Ophidiophobia”, had been written for some time, and the cancellation of the Remain In Light tour set the stage for what would be the first Turkuaz/Jerry Harrison/Adrian Belew collaboration on record. Explained Brandwein, “We had always planned on doing a little bit of Turkuaz material in the upcoming Remain in Light tour with Adrian Belew and Jerry Harrison. Once the pandemic hit and the tour was postponed, I started to think this would be a really nice track to have those guys on.”
When the canceled 2020 edition of Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival pivoted to a streaming event, Virtual ROO-ALITY, organizers turned to the Remain In Light crew to offer up a virtual performance in place of their planned 2020 live set. As Harrison added about the virtual performance in a social media comment, “Trivia time: The strat I’m playing is the same strat from Stop Making Sense.
Check out the virtual set below and join us in crossing your fingers that this star-crossed collaboration eventually makes it to a real stage.
Remain In Light ft. Turkuaz, Jerry Harrison, Adrian Belew – Bonnaroo Virtual ROO-ALITY – Full Set
[Video: Turkuaz]
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