David Byrne Profile Karl Whitney The Belfast Telegraph, Friday 3rd April 2009 - - - - David Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman who arrives on Tuesday night to play the Waterfront Hall, is in many ways much changed from the skinny, nerdy kid who jerkily choked out the lyrics to his band’s debut single ‘Psycho Killer’ during the band’s appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978. Subsequently, in the early 1980s, Talking Heads had a series of hits like ‘Burning Down the House’ and ‘Road to Nowhere’, and in the process they became one of the biggest bands in the world. However, nowadays much of Talking Heads’ critical reputation rests on a series of three albums the band recorded with producer Brian Eno between 1978 and 1980: ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’, ‘Fear of Music’ and ‘Remain in Light’. Songs from these three albums, as well as from Byrne’s 1981 experimental collaboration with Eno, ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’, will make up the set when the ex-Talking Heads frontman takes the stage in Belfast. The date forms part of his ongoing tour, which is billed as the ‘Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno’ – although Eno will not take part, insisting recently that he’d rather be sick than perform onstage again. Byrne has put together a relaxed show that reflects his increasingly mellow outlook and mature years – he’s now aged 56 – and showcases the diversity of material he and Eno recorded over the last thirty years. But why has Byrne chosen to revisit his collaborations with Eno? After all, in the intervening years, Byrne has carved out an intriguingly varied career that includes directing a movie (True Stories, made in 1986), writing soundtracks for a number of films and TV shows, and continued solo musical success. Conceivably, such diverse efforts could be viewed as signs of creative stagnation, if one didn’t get the unshakeable feeling that Byrne is continually moving forward. Byrne's single-mindedness has been noted by some of his ex-bandmates: bass player Tina Weymouth called him ‘a man incapable of returning friendship’, who would cut off attachments ‘when a thing/person is perceived to have served its purpose’. In a 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Byrne let slip that the band had broken up. This was news to the other members of the group: Byrne had never informed them directly of his decision. They still harbour much resentment towards the singer. A trained artist – Talking Heads were formed while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design – Byrne has continued to work on art projects in parallel to his career in music. His photographic work, ‘Sleepless Nights’, was exhibited in the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast in 1998. More recently he has worked on site-specific projects in New York: ‘Playing the Building’, an ambitious exhibit where visitors could ‘play’ the sounds of a building’s structure through a pipe organ onsite. Byrne is a keen cyclist who brings a folding bike on tour with him so he can cycle around the local areas he visits, and this interest in cycling led him to design a series of playful bike racks for the streets of New York. He has also linked the artistic and musical strands of his work in a recent project, a musical based on the life of former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos, written with Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim). During one of the preview performances, Byrne reassured the audience that the bizarre story they were seeing was actually true: ‘All this is highly researched. This is not artistic license. This is reporting,’ he said. Such precision is a hallmark of much of Byrne’s work: Talking Heads were marked out from many of their punk peers by their often sophisticated wordplay and the perfectionism of their playing. More recently, on his current tour, he brought in a choreographer to orchestrate a dance routine involving 100 dancers in white tutus, a routine that concluded a concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall in spectacular fashion. In spite of his numerous artistic pursuits, music remains of central importance to Byrne. Ultimately, Byrne has revisited his past work with Eno because of his latest record, ‘Everything That Happens Will Happen Today’. Released last summer, initially by internet download via Byrne’s personal website, the album is his first work with Eno since 1981. Collaboration on the record was carried out at some distance: Eno and Byrne each recorded sound files in their home studios, and emailed them back and forth across the Atlantic until they were happy with the results. (Eno lives in London, Byrne in Manhattan.) They then came together in London to complete work on the album, and within a week of it being completed, they released it online. The record shows little sign of being rushed, however. Influenced in part by gospel and country music, mellow warmth suffuses much of the collection: unusual when compared to Byrne’s earlier spiky and arch approach to songwriting. Acknowledging that his new record draws ‘on an old kind of emotional song’, Byrne said recently that ‘a lot of the songs are about hope in the face of fear, paranoia, terror or whatever’. Yet the laidback feeling is in part illusory: for every heartfelt profession of emotion in songs such as ‘Life is Long’, there is the unnerving ‘Home’, which, rather threateningly, will ‘infect whatever you do’. The song ‘Strange Overtones’, given away free online as a taster for the album, is reminiscent of late Talking Heads, and ‘Feel My Stuff’ comes across as an edgily ambient piece, built on Byrne’s spooked falsetto and a tumbling piano line from Eno. The latter has been derided by some critics as a retread of trip-hop, but its peculiarities make it compelling. The Guardian’s music critic Alexis Petridis has described the album as ‘less about venturing boldly forth into the unknown than retreating gently into a less complicated and troubled past’, yet that doesn’t quite do the record justice. Nostalgia doesn’t seem a motivating factor in its creation. Even quite recently Byrne seemed to feel little nostalgia for the old days, writing of Talking Heads that he ‘was just not the same person’ who had been part of that band, and underlining that he ‘can’t go to that place anymore’. Perhaps the return to his earlier work is Byrne’s response to the scores of fans who fervently wish that Talking Heads would re-form. After the band’s break-up, a possible reunion has been repeatedly suggested, but Byrne has always shot the possibility down. They played together in 2002 at the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but when drummer Chris Frantz suggested a reunion two years later, Byrne pointedly refused. Some bands, Byrne has said, ‘should just go away and never come back.’ Maybe his current tour is Byrne’s way of revisiting the past without going backwards. © Belfast Telegraph -------- Journalism | Home | About