David Byrne Options

[jac]

I had never heard of Stephen Colbert before, let alone seen him. I don't think we get him in Australia. I like him, he's got a nice twinkle in his eyes and tongue planted in cheek, which is always a good thing. He looks nothing like him at all but he reminded me a bit of Kevin Spacey

Yes, we do get him on The Comedy Channel, and he may or may not have been on SBS once upon a time!?

[Cheryl L.]

Just musing, no evidence, please be clear!

I can't really believe David Byrne didn't mention the Aussie/NZ leg of his tour in his journal because he didn't have the time ... that just doesn't ring true. He did some really nice write ups in 2005. Michael Chugg was the promoter then ...

This time it was Andrew McManus.

I didn't know about the charity concert at Hamer Hall. Alright, I hadn't been keeping up with the news but I hear about most things before most people I know.

The first I knew about it was when I picked up my ticket for the second show on February 10th, at Hamer Hall, the night of the first concert. on February 9th.

I thought the ticket prices had been halved because the tickets weren't selling well, till I read on my ticket NOT The Songs of Byrne and Eno, but David Byrne Concert for Challenge (I've probably got the exact wording wrong, but that's the gist). I thought (until I read up about it the next day) that the proceeds must be going to the Bushfire relief.

Then, next day, I found out that the charity concert had been organised a few weeks before (sorry, don't know exactly). I didn't know till then what Challenge was (Kids with Cancer). My ignorance, but you just cannot donate to all charities.

Point is, I SHOULD have known. My email should have been bombarded with information, both from Andrew McManus and Ticketmaster, urging me to buy tickets to support a most worth cause and telling me to pass the message on to everyone I knew.

I heard nothing, zero, zip.

I'm very glad my last minute decision to try and get to the second show meant my money did some good ... it certainly did no good to our bank balance, so I'm extra glad.

Maybe people criticised David for not contributing to the fire relief. I don't know ... his Melbourne concert was a day later and he had already committed to the Challenge kids cancer charity.

Who, besides me, has heard about that? What exactly did the promoter do to make the public aware?

Not much that I know about.

I don't know whether or not DB's dealings with McManus have anything to do with him not doing an Australian/New Zealand write up. It certainly had nothing to do with the reviews ... they were all amazing.

It's just very, very odd and I guess I'll never know.

I have NO idea how Mr. McManus has gotten so far, so fast, in the music world. Five years ago nobody had even heard of this man at all. I did some research on him a while ago, and according to his website he was once the manager of the Divinyls. But, according to the dates, this would have been towards the end of their career - not when they were really successful, in the early days of the 80's. He was also the manager of a live venue and this is where he claims he 'cut his teeth' on the music biz. Well, he may THINK he knows it all, but he clearly doesn't. For one, his public relations skills stink to high heaven. As far as I can tell, his number one priority seems to be to promote HIMSELF and to make us much money has he can to line his own pockets. He appears in the social columns more often than Gudinski, Chugg, Jacobsen, Coppel and co. altogether. (I won't even mention Wheatley - he has his own reasons for not being in the social pages very much these days. )

While I'm sure McManus has probably worked hard over the years to get to where he is in such a short time, I also think he's extremely good at squeezing as much money out of people (i.e. us, the poor sucker punters) as he can get, and I think this is how come he's skyrocketed up to the top of the promoter tree. And yet, he treats the ticket-buying public like shit. But, why should he give a damn about going out of his way to keep the public updated about what's happening when he's already got their money in the bank from ticket sales that happened months ago?? That fiasco with the 'free' digital downloads was disgraceful. If you advertise a FREE digital download with EVERY ticket purchased, that's exactly what you should deliver. You don't inflate the ticket price to cover the 'free' price, and you DON'T go back on your word about only offering the 'free' download with every single PURCHASE, instead of every single TICKET. If they meant that from the beginning, then they should have made it clear FROM THE BEGINNING. But like I said, his communication with his customers sucks. It's almost non-existant. I will NEVER forget the cavalier way in which they moved that Casino show back in 2006 at the very last minute, transferring it from probably the best venue in the entire country (the intimate Palms Room) to that great bloody aircraft hanger - the Palladium Room - at Crown. I'll never get to see Isaak play in such a great venue ever again - that's it for me as far as I'm concerned. I can't afford to shell out $150+ for concert tickets anymore, no matter where it's held. Things go wrong at the last minute, fair enough, but at least give us a REAL explanation, instead of spouting the same old 'unforseeable circumstances' crap. Well, WHAT bloody 'unforseeable circumstances'?? Why not tell us the truth for once? Don't we deserve to know? After all, it's OUR money that's enabling the whole thing to take place in the first place.

As far as David Byrne is concerned (good write-ups, stuff, I skimmed - trust me.) my guess is that it was HIS idea to do the charity thing, not McManus at all. I'm sure David (from the little I know of him - I've got a Talking Heads album somewhere, the True Stories one, I think....) is a humanitarian who insisted on the charity show. I doubt very much whether McManus would care that deeply. As I think I said before here, he was most notable in his absence from the REAL concert promoters in this country's efforts to put Sound Relief together. Even jailbird Glenn Wheatley contributed to the Channel 9 telethon a few weeks ago, so what the hell did McManus contribute? I hope I'm proved wrong by this and maybe he's already made, or is planning some kind of contribution that we just haven't heard about yet, but time will tell, I guess. In the meantime, there's nothing else to indicate to me, as far as I'm concerned, that this guy isn't just another slick, snake oil salesman who is out to line his own pockets as fast as he can.

[stuff & nonsense]

Yes, we do get him on The Comedy Channel, and he may or may not have been on SBS once upon a time!?

Well, I just proved I don't watch TV!

[stuff & nonsense]

Thought you might like to learn a little more about David Byrne, Cheryl ... I dare you not to laugh, don't watch these while you're eating or drinking, you might choke


These two are classic ... funny as


http://www.iamfauxpas.com/blog/index.php/2...rviews-himself/


As they said in Rolling Stone, just replace the two characters with Joaquin Phoenix and David Letterman, if you want to update it



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzC2a0znVsc


Funny, there seems to be a problem with the buffering when you click on the links here, I have no idea why, of course!

But if you go to YouTube and type in David Byrne Space Ghost and David Byrne interview and watch them direct they're fine. Who knows?!

[stuff & nonsense]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/4...tay-hungry.html


David Byrne: stay hungry



David Byrne’s voracious creative appetite has seen him turn a building into a musical instrument, design a series of bicycle racks and write a disco opera about Imelda Marcos. Now he is revisiting his early Talking Heads period, but always with an ear open for something new.



By Richard Grant
Last Updated: 5:55PM GMT 16 Mar 2009


David Byrne: 'Byrne is a workaholic renaissance man living in the future who makes everybody else look lazy and out of touch'

There is a muffled cry from within the hotel suite and then a startled, barefoot, shirtless David Byrne opens the door with his white hair standing on end. 'Oh,' he says. 'Wow. I was at this museum and wow, um, well, maybe if you don't mind, I guess we could talk while I pack.' The suite is a jumble of big armoured suitcases, piles of dry-cleaned clothes, camera and computer equipment, stacks of CDs, hats and shoes, a folding bicycle with a travel case.

Byrne is five months into an 11-month world tour and the bicycle is a key component of his portable lifestyle, allowing him to escape the touring musician's trap of hotel-venue-bar-hotel and explore the parks, museums, art galleries and CD shops of whatever city he happens to be in. Today, it is Seattle and he has just cycled back from an exhibition of antique court miniatures from Rajasthan. 'Very cosmic stuff,' he says, pulling on a grey collared sweater and failing to notice that it is inside-out. 'Feet with silver rivers coming out of them and wrapping around the multitudes. Very nice and very hard to know what they all mean.'

He is touring because he loves to tour and perform live, and a convenient excuse to get back on the road has presented itself. Byrne released an album last autumn called Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and it is his first collaboration with Brian Eno since 1981, when they opened up a new genre of music with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A sound collage of spiky funk rhythms, weird electronic noises and recorded snippets of American radio preachers, Arabic singers and chanters, an exorcist and other 'found vocals', as Byrne and Eno called them at the time, Bush of Ghosts helped usher in the era of sampling and loops.

Except for a few blurts, clicks and hisses, the new album sounds nothing like its historic predecessor. Byrne sings his own lyrics this time, in a voice that sounds surprisingly tender and heartfelt compared with the neurotic, slightly strangulated style that made him famous with Talking Heads. And Eno, who produced three albums for Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music and Remain in Light), pioneered electronic ambient music and has lately been producing mega­hits for Coldplay, has come up with a fairly conventional set of catchy pop arrangements.

'We're calling it electronic folk gospel,' Byrne says, transferring immaculately pressed short-sleeved shirts from a broken suitcase to a new one. Underneath the shirts, he finds a pair of clear plastic sandals and holds them up. 'We were in Singapore so I've got all this hot weather stuff,' he says. 'Sandals, sun block… won't be needing these any more. Still, no sense throwing them away.' He tries to get back to the point he was making but it is not quite available to him now, so he stares out of the window, holding the sandals, waiting patiently for his thoughts to arrange themselves and the words to return, looking like a man who has gone through this process many thousands of times and grown comfortable with it.

'But yeah,' he continues. 'After I got Brian's tracks, I kept them for a long time because I was probably a little afraid of how to begin, not because I didn't like the tracks, but because I thought, Oh, there's going to be expectations. People are going to think it will be Bush of Ghosts 2 or Remain in Light 2. Or they're going to expect the same sense of surprise that those records gave them at the time, and I didn't want to compete with that.'

From the broken suitcase he pulls out a green apron with a cartoon of a fat, slavering chef on the front. 'I've got lots of souvenirs!' he exclaims. 'They were giving these aprons away free in Wellington if you spent more than $10 at this pharmacy and I thought, I need a cooking apron, and look at the label, this one is 100 per cent polyester!'

He laughs heartily, exposing perfect white teeth. 'But yeah, eventually, having listened to a few of Brian's tracks, over and over again, I said, "Brian, this is the vibe I'm getting. The chords and the chord changes you're using are giving me a kind of gospel feel." And of course at the same time it was very electronic sounding. I said I would write words to go in that direction and that's pretty much how it happened.'

There is still a peculiar, slightly absent quality about David Byrne, but he seems a lot more comfortable in his skin than he used to be in the Talking Heads days, at the height of his fame, when interviews would sometimes send him into a twitching, writhing, tongue-tied agony. He is 56 now and he has aged well. The passing years have been kind to his face and his body and given him a grace and dignity that he wears lightly and un­affectedly.

He divorced his costume designer wife Adelle Lutz in 2004 – they have a 19-year-old daughter, Malu – and his current girlfriend is the artist Cindy Sherman, who, as Byrne puts it, 'takes photos of herself that you would never recognise as her'. She has been on tour with him, with her own folding bicycle, but she flew off to Berlin yesterday to open her latest exhibition there. 'We've been together a couple years now,' he says. 'That's pretty good, knock on wood.'

He still has a tremendous, omnivorous appetite for the latest thing in music, art, books, film, culture, technology, and his own creative energy seems like a marvel from an outside perspective, although he sees it as something steady, plodding and reliable. 'I never get stuck or run out of ideas, but I don't always hit the peaks. But I also know that if I sat and waited for a great inspiration to come, I might be waiting for a long time. You have to be active, to get the ball when it comes, in the game, it's flying, it's not – somebody made a metaphor something like that.' He pauses and waits. 'So yeah, keep busy, just keep doing it and every once in a while I say, "OK, that might last. That's a keeper." '

At present, he is collaborating with young, experimental groups such as Dirty Projectors and Arcade Fire. He has kept a finger on the pulse of the dance music scene and is now working with the New York band Brazilian Girls, the superstar DJ collective NASA, and producing a 22-song disco opera about Imelda Marcos with Norman Cook. 'Oh, Imelda loved disco,' he explains. 'She spent a lot of time going to the clubs in New York and she actually converted a floor of her house into a kind of nightclub with the mirror ball and everything, so it seemed like a good way to get into her story. The songs are all written but we've got 22 different singers so it's taking a while to finish.'

Then there are his film soundtrack albums, his photography (14 books published so far), his writing, the record label he founded and a more or less constant stream of art projects. Most recently he transformed a disused building in Manhattan into a musical instrument, attaching hammers to the pipes and girders, fitting compressed-air hoses in the plumbing, and wiring it all into the keyboard of an old pump organ and inviting the public to 'play the building'; in August, to his great excitement, he will be doing the same thing to the Roundhouse in London. He has also found the time to design a series of conceptual bicycle racks for the New York City Department of Transportation, one in the shape of a dollar sign for Wall Street, another like a high-heeled shoe outside the Bergdorf Goodman department store, and so on.

Ross Godfrey of the band Morcheeba, who worked as a co-producer on one of Byrne's solo albums, describes him as 'a renaissance man living in the future who is a bloody workaholic and makes everybody else look lazy and out of touch. He is a much-needed figure in the tumultuous times we live in. He lives his art and he has been a guiding light in the music industry for many people keen to move on from the now-dead model of business.'

Byrne, whose words come out a lot more crisply on the page than in person, and is a lot more pragmatic and astute than one might expect, wrote a very influential article for Wired magazine last year about the various business strategies available to musicians in the era of free downloading. In general, he is optimistic about the future of music and musicians, although not the future of big record companies.

'People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask,' he says. 'They might never get to the point where they're a serious threat to Coldplay, let's say, but in most cases that's not their ambition anyway. The difference now, with the production and distribution costs being so minimal, is that you can survive on the small scale, whereas before you needed to get up into the big leagues to survive.'

He packs up his camera and folds his laptop shut. He puts on a pair of socks. He zips up one of his suitcases and then remembers to double-check the bathroom. He pads in there and, sure enough, finds two items in the shower. He finishes packing, checks his watch and then sits down facing me with both feet flat on the floor and his body in perfect symmetry, absolutely motionless except for the restless, evasive, lustrous brown eyes.

David Byrne's artistic sensibility – the perpetually bemused outsider, quirky and faux-naive, 'making the ordinary dramatic and the dramatic ordinary', as he once said – has obviously been influenced and reinforced by his 30 years in the art and music scene of downtown Manhattan, where he still lives, but he traces its genesis back to his childhood. He was born in Dumbarton, Scotland (a point of pride, like his British passport), and came to America with his parents at the age of two. Growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, listening to his parents pointing out the strange and different ways in which Americans did things, and often having to translate his parents' thick Scottish accents so that other people could understand them, he not only felt like an outsider but found it impossible to take seriously the concept of 'normal life'.

It comes as no surprise to learn that he grew into a loner who sought refuge in pop music and became obsessed with it. Social interaction was so difficult and frightening for him as a young man that he wonders if he had borderline Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, and whether he cured it by performing music. He formed Talking Heads in 1975, having dropped out of art school in Rhode Island and reconnected with two of his art school friends in New York City.

With Tina Weymouth on bass, Chris Frantz on drums and a scrawny, geeky, bug-eyed Byrne on guitar and vocals, wearing sensible shirts and narrow ties amid all the leather and chains, the band made its name at CBGBs, a now-defunct downtown Manhattan club that also produced the Ramones and Blondie. A fourth Talking Head, Jerry Harrison, later joined from the band Modern Lovers, and the label art-rock became affixed to the group. They had more of a dance groove than their new-wave contemporaries and Byrne was writing and singing clever, ironic, angst-ridden lyrics.

'I really had a lot of trouble functioning socially at that time,' Byrne says. 'But I could blurt out my ideas and my feelings on stage, as well as just being up there saying, "Look at me, listen to me, I've got something to say. I'm somebody and I've got something and this is the only way I can talk to you. We can't really have a conversation, I'm afraid." ' He laughs at the memory and says it took many years but eventually the fear of social encounters just started to go away.

'I'd like to credit therapy or some of that sort of stuff, which I did for a little bit, but it was probably time more than anything else. And luckily for me, being a performer and a creative person whose work was kind of accepted, it meant that people would come up to me – girls and other people – because they were interested in what I was doing. It was still terrifying but that part of breaking the ice was in some cases taken care of. Phew, yeah. Although after a while you realise that you don't only want to talk to people who are fans, that it might not necessarily be a good idea.'

Talking Heads had a long, fine run, leaving behind eight studio albums, two live albums and Jonathan Demme's concert film Stop Making Sense, which immortalised Byrne as a palsied white man dancing as if trapped in a preposterously big suit. He wore it, he says, with a typically disingenuous piece of logic, because he wanted his head to look small. In 1991, at Byrne's insistence, Talking Heads split up amid bitter acrimony. Tina Weymouth in particular had some very harsh things to say about him and she said them loudly and publicly, that he was 'controlling', 'incapable of returning friendship', 'a vampire' and even 'a murderer'. He looks back at it now as a bad divorce that happened nearly 20 years ago.

He has now made eight solo albums and toured behind them all, but only recently has he become enthused about playing Talking Heads songs again. 'Enough time has passed now,' he says. 'And on this tour it's the Eno connection. I realised we weren't going to be able to just play the new stuff, so we tie in some old stuff from Bush of Ghosts and from the three Talking Heads records that Eno produced. It always puzzles me because you wouldn't go to see a playwright's work and expect to hear the best bits from all his plays. But when you go to see a pop songwriter's work, that's what you expect. But it's fine. We've really been enjoying ourselves and that's why we're making it such a long tour. We just agreed to do a date in Istanbul.'

With his suitcases packed and his sweater still inside-out, Byrne puts on a deerstalker hat, a hooded woollen coat and a pair of black-and-white golf shoes with the spikes removed. 'They're just comfortable shoes, sorta stylish I guess. If you like, you can walk over to the venue with me.'

He has sold out the 2,500-seat symphony hall and on the way there Byrne talks excitedly about Brazil, where he took his first real holiday in a very long time and stayed with his friend the singer Caetano Veloso, and bought nearly 100 new CDs. Through Luaka Bop, the record label he founded in the late 1980s but no longer runs, Byrne has done more than anyone to introduce the rest of the world to the great Brazilian auteurs such as Veloso, Tom Ze and Os Mutantes. His latest enthusiasm is Japanese folk music as reinterpreted and absorbed by its rock and pop musicians, and he went on another enormous shopping spree for CDs in Tokyo, uploading his favourites to his website, davidbyrne.com, and then packing them all in a crate and shipping them home.

Jim White, an alt-country singer on Luaka Bop who has toured extensively with Byrne, says, 'I've never met anyone who loves music as much as him. Every town we'd come to he'd get on his bike and ride to the record store, ask what was interesting that he couldn't hear anywhere else, buy dozens of obscure CDs, and listen to every one of them on the tour bus.'

When we get to the Symphony Hall, a security guard directs us down through various stairways, lifts and corridors to the dressing-rooms, where many pairs of white shoes are lined up neatly; in Byrne's room there is a piano, three lemons and the biggest root of ginger I have ever seen. Colds and flu are a constant menace to touring musicians and Byrne swears by his homemade ginger and lemon tea as a preventative.

The last time he toured he had a six-piece string section. This time he has three dancers, three backing singers, a drummer, keyboardist, a percussion prodigy and a wickedly funky bass player who used to play with Chaka Khan and Nile Rodgers. There is no support act and when they take the stage, all dressed in white, with Byrne front and centre at the microphone, the audience sets up an ecstatic roar of applause that goes on for a full five minutes.

'Wow,' Byrne says as it finally starts to subside. 'I'm going home now. I got what I came for.' Then, and it is noticeable how much more fluent, confident and chatty he is in front of 2,500 strangers, he lays out what he calls 'the menu' for the evening's entertainment – a sampling of all the work that he and Brian Eno have done over the years. He counts off the introduction and the band kicks in to Strange Overtones, a self-deprecating pop-funk song about writing a song. 'This groove is out of fashion,' he sings. 'These beats are 20 years old.'

Two hours later, after a joyful, radiant, applause-drenched performance, and a fourth and final encore for which Byrne and all the dancers and musicians wore frilly white tutus, the drinks are flowing backstage and everyone looks flushed and giddy. Byrne, with people all around him, camera flashes going off and a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear to smoke later, is laughing and grinning like a man on top of the world.

He sits down with a fresh beer, and a radio DJ is asking him about the psychedelic African music he has collected and released on Luaka Bop, and someone else is asking about the documentary he made about the chicken-sacrificing Candomblé religion in Brazil, and then I ask him about a little thing I noticed in the sleevenotes to the new album, a reference to a book called What Is the What?, the fictionalised biography of a former child refugee from Sudan by Byrne's friend Dave Eggers.

'Oh, I was thinking about that book all the time while I was making this record,' Byrne says. 'Valentino, the Sudanese guy, goes through all kinds of unrelenting horrors, but he's eternally hopeful and even cheerful, in a way that defies all logic, and I wanted to get some of that spirit of resilience in the music. In the end that's what humans – and animals too, I guess – are all about. They go on, despite everything.'

Later, most of the dancers and musicians reconvene at a place with no name, no windows and a pink door. Behind the door is a man with a walkie-talkie and some stairs and a corridor and another door that opens into a nightclub set up to look like an old speakeasy. On stage are three men dressed in 1930s suits, singing 1930s songs in close harmony and accompanying themselves with ukulele, stand-up bass and drums. Byrne, back in his deerstalker and golf shoes, is standing at the bar with a pint of ale and a big smile on his face, moving his head and shoulders to the clickety-clack rhythm and singing along with the words. People are trying to get a word with him about this and that, and I try, too, but he just laughs and grins and says, 'These guys are great!' and then goes back inside the music.

David Byrne's British tour starts on March 27 (tickets: livenation.co.uk) He headlines the Ether 09 festival at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on April 12 and 13 (southbankcentre.co.uk)

[Cheryl L.]

Thought you might like to learn a little more about David Byrne, Cheryl ... I dare you not to laugh, don't watch these while you're eating or drinking, you might choke


These two are classic ... funny as


http://www.iamfauxpas.com/blog/index.php/2...rviews-himself/


As they said in Rolling Stone, just replace the two characters with Joaquin Phoenix and David Letterman, if you want to update it



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzC2a0znVsc


Funny, there seems to be a problem with the buffering when you click on the links here, I have no idea why, of course!

But if you go to YouTube and type in David Byrne Space Ghost and David Byrne interview and watch them direct they're fine. Who knows?!

I forgot about those huge jackets he used to wear.....one of the most enduring memories from the 80's surely - oversized shoulder pads, lol. Byrne is actually a family name (Mum's maiden name) so perhaps David and our family are related, in some very distant fashion?? (If his ancestors hail from Country Wicklow in Ireland, we may be onto something!)

[stuff & nonsense]

I'm not going to copy and paste because there are graphs and stuff that I never have and never will be able to get my head around!

It's not new ... I've come across it several times, but it is REALLY worth reading (as is everything else he comes up with). This man is not your average pop star, to put it mildly!


http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/m...currentPage=all

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists ­ and Megastars

By David Byrne 12.18.07

[stuff & nonsense]

I'm not going to copy and paste because there are graphs and stuff that I never have and never will be able to get my head around!

It's not new ... I've come across it several times, but it is REALLY worth reading (as is everything else he comes up with). This man is not your average pop star, to put it mildly!


http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/m...currentPage=all

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists ­ and Megastars

By David Byrne 12.18.07

Still the great reviews keep rolling in. So many of them it's unbelievable .... I SO envy people yet to see the show

I wish I had felt better, that the build up to the shows hadn't been so disgustingly hot and horrible and that the devastating fires hadn't welcomed David and company back to Melbourne. And we didn't get Burning Down the House complete with tutus ...

If you didn't catch him in the UK (like several people I know who shall remain nameless silly sausages!) then that leg is over ... he is back in Europe just now and has added more dates in the US. He must be fit!!


http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/gig-41...mp;blockStart=0

Ether 09: David Byrne

Once in a lifetime live music from David Byrne
By John Aizlewood, Evening Standard 14.04.09


Evening Standard rating John Aizlewood's rating *****
Evening Standard rating Reader rating *****



Burning down the house: a tutu-clad David Byrne is wholly reborn as a live act, blending sound and vision to produce a breathless show
David Byrne

All white on the night: Byrne, his band and three dancers were dressed like a Fifties cricket team

(click on the link to see yet more photos )

In the 21 years since Naked, the final Talking Heads album, leader David Byrne’s solo career has chugged along pleasantly enough, but no more.

Perhaps it’s his new relationship with the groundbreaking American photographer Cindy Sherman or perhaps it’s the realisation that at 56 he still has much to prove, but suddenly Byrne is bursting through boundaries once again.

Last year’s collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and his lovely soundtrack to the US television programme Big Love suggested a creative stirring, but even those fine albums failed to serve notice that as a live act Byrne is wholly and fabulously reborn.

Last night, the second of Byrne’s two for the Southbank’s Ether festival which runs until 24 April, was a two-hour cornucopia of delight covering Byrne’s two albums with Eno, Talking Heads staples and My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks) from his 1981 collaboration with choreographer Twyla Tharp. Yet it was more than catalogue cherry-picking.

From the moment the Scottish-born New Yorker emerged with his four-man band and three backing singers, there was magic afoot.

Like some Fifties cricket team, the entire ensemble were clad from head to toe in white — the colour of Byrne’s hair and his braces — and they were often joined by three white-wearing dancers, choreographed in the faux-natural style (the one that requires intensive rehearsal to look off-the-cuff) of Fatboy Slim’s Praise You video.

When they weren’t jiving with the backing singers or grappling with each other like tactile ninjas, the dervish dancers leapfrogged over Byrne during a jaw-droppingly spectacular version of Talking Heads’s Once In A Lifetime; they caught him as he dropped — still singing — during Houses In Motion and they joined him on swivelling office chairs for Life Is Long.

In lesser hands, with weaker music the dancers would have hijacked the show. Instead, sound and vision enhanced each other and when the dancers took a breather nobody’s attention wandered. In fact, the crowd adored it and Crosseyed And Painless was so irresistibly funky that it invoked a mass, spontaneous charge to the front which startled and delighted Byrne, although surely it happens every night he plays.

And for the third encore, a special treat when Eno himself — dressed in white of course — added backing vocals to the heartbreaking lullaby Everything That Happens. Live music really doesn’t get any better than this. Breathlessly brilliant.


Reader reviews (3)

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Here's a sample of the latest reviews published. You can click view all to read all reviews that readers have sent in.

Tremendous gig - both on the ears and the eyes. Even with a 4 piece band plus percussionist the groove was reminiscent of those early 80s extended band gigs you still thankfully find on YouTube these days. From the manic sermon of Once in a Lifetime to the co-ordinated treadmill running of Life During Wartime it could have been 25 years ago.

It was great to see that music can still be art, which is as important now as it was then.

- Si James, London, UK

Do yourselves a favor and get a copy DVD/VHS of the 1986 David Byrne movie "True Stories". After seeing it, and listening to the great numbers written by David, and performed by the late , great Talking Heads, you will want to jump on a Virgin Atlantic flight, and join David down in mythical Virgil Texas, and live a "Wild, Wild Life".

- John Bowles(Ex Pat Englishman), White Plains, New York,USA.

Couldn't agree more on this review. We shared the same feelings as Mister Aizlewood enjoying as much as him the featured Byrne show last month in Antwerp. The Antwerp crowd even got a fourth encore. Byrne and company performed as if it was their first and last gig. Indeed : brilliant. Best concert and concept in years.

- Jo Van Crombruggen, Brussels, Belgium

[stuff & nonsense]

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

worth reading

[stuff & nonsense]

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

worth reading

I hope the very interesting lady on this board who was going to this show, made it! She knows who she is ... it sounds super and there are some really good photos with the first review!

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around_town/the_...e-Audience.html

David Byrne Awes Greek Theatre Audience

By STAN ADLER

Updated 9:27 PM PDT, Tue, Jun 30, 2009


After being greeted by cheers and applause, David Byrne stepped up to the mic at the Greek Theatre on Friday night and quipped that they might even be doing some Greek tragedies­appropriately, he noted, mentioning Euripides and quickly informing the crowd that it wouldn’t be his pants.

David Byrne Grooves the Greek
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Photos: Berkeley was the final U.S. stop on David Byrne's "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today" tour before heading to Europe in July.

For Byrne fans, this was the right introduction­a touch of the erudite and a little bit goofy.

He started it all off with a song from his new album ("Everything that Happens Will Happen Today") called “Strange Overtones.” It’s a ballad that soars, proudly proclaiming: “This groove is out of fashion/These beats are 20 years old.”

If there was any doubt as to the coolness of where you were, it was immediately dismissed upon realizing that whatever happened would be happening tonight at the Greek.

Byrne stood with perfect posture in his all-white attire and, with occasional hops, skips, and measured dance steps, led an ensemble of seven musicians and three dancers through new songs interspersed with Talking Heads standards.

Byrne has called his music “folk electronic gospel”­and he delivered a rock sermon that had everyone in the audience from the pit to the top of the lawn testifying in a foot chugging reverie, shaking their heads with sweet awe and shimmying in and out of their seats.

“Heaven”­like a lot of the earlier material­didn’t include the dancers, and seemed better that way. The three clownish Felliniesque dancers added a sense of theater even though their routines sometimes seemed closer to calisthenics.

Byrne shed his white blazer to belt out a beseeching, gut wrenching, and desperate version of “Born Under Punches” and then finished up with "Once in a Lifetime", "Life During Wartime" and "Feel My Stuff."

Predictably, the Greek reverberated with chants and cheers for encores. Three followed, with “Take Me to the River” looking like the greatest exit number any band could ask for until Byrne said, “Wait, there’s more.”

Then the Bay Area's very own Extra Action Marching Band came marching down from the top of the amphitheater, winding its way through the crowd with silver pompoms, flags, muscled men and curvy women in sexy costumes with tubas, horns, drums, and full parade regalia swarming onto a fully lit stage.

Extra Action joined Byrne for a completely choreographed 40-person "Road to Nowhere" which was magical, and then for a tense and threatening (tingling) version of “Burning Down the House” while hundreds of white balloons floated down onto the stage and into the pit to everyone's delight.

And this is the perverse genius of Byrne, who can go to the wall with his existential tales and quotidian tragedies and have you smiling and bursting into laughter.

Performers and audience alike kicked and popped balloons, David Byrne stood in the middle of it all looking like the ring master of one of the greatest shows on earth.

For the last encore the marching band stayed back stage while Byrne sang "Everything that Happens" the title track off his new album with Brian Eno ("Everything That Happens Will Happen Today").

It's one of those sweet songs, until you listen to the words and feel the strangely reassuring ominous side of a modern rock master. At that point in the concert, you knew everything had happened.


A person who was moving toward the exit said: “It was a good party.” That seemed to say it all.

Stan Adler was last seen chasing a white balloon across UC Berkeley campus singing Everything that Happens at the top of his lungs.


Friday Night: David Byrne at the Greek Theatre

By Meredith Brody in Last Night
Saturday, Jun. 27 2009 @ 7:07PM

David Byrne, the cerebral, witty art rocker who has explored many areas of music and performance since his beginnings as part of the Talking Heads in the 70s, entranced a capacity crowd at Berkeley's Greek Theatre with a show entitled Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno. Eno and Byrne first collaborated on the Talking Head's second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, in 1978, and continued through two more Talking Heads albums and the 1981 Byrne/Eno album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. After thirty years, they rejoined to make Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Byrne, all in white, to match his now-white hair, joined onstage by four musicians, three singers, and (eventually) three dancers, also all in white, greeted a crowd already amped and amused by a lively set from globally-inspired musical gypsies DeVotchKa. Referencing the stately setting, he said "We'll be doing some Greek tragedies -- Euripides," almost but not quite quoting the vaudeville stalwart "Euripides? Eumenides!" by continuing "No, not my pants...We're going to do some Brian Eno stuff, and other things that he and I did back in the day -- and break the rule book and do some other stuff, too."

Whereupon the group launched into a seamless celebration, beginning with Strange Overtones from the new album, and continuing through fourteen more songs, including much of Everything that Happens, but also many more. Shifting lights in primary colors and Byrne's playful interaction with the dancers (choreographed in arty-yet-artless, rather gymnastic modern-dance style by Noemie Lafrance, Annie-B Parson, and robbinschilds), as well as a constant re-configuring of the musicians, kept things more than fresh.

After a version of the Talking Heads' Houses in Motion, the audience cheered for so long it stopped the show, making Byrne giggle "Oh my goodness, thank you, wow" before launching into My Big Nurse, sounding almost country-western (in a show that also featured gospel, Afro-Cuban, and techno/ambient influences.)

Byrne writes lyrics that sound simple but that are at the same time not just allusive and poetic but aphoristic. In a setting that sometimes seemed partially obscured by blue clouds of marijuana smoke, eventually the state of bliss and connectedness with an artist in which he seemed to be speaking directly to you was achieved. The people standing in the enormous fluid mosh pit that is the ground floor of the Greek were constantly moving; many sitting down on the huge stone stairs that form the ampitheathre were rapt with attention, silently mouthing the lyrics along with Byrne.

By the time Byrne launched into the Heads' Once in a Lifetime (during which a dancer leapt over his head), seguing into Life during Wartime, the lines "this ain't no party, this ain't no disco," were belied by the fact that most of the crowd were on their feet. They calmed a bit while Byrne sang the plaintive I Feel My Stuff ("I think I waited too long..."), which was the last song before the inevitable encores.

He introduced his musicians -- Mark Degli Antoni on keyboards, Paul Frazier on bass, Mauro Refrosco on percussion, Graham Hawthorne on drums -- before launching into Take Me to the River. For a moment, I thought the first big notes were the intro to Beat It, in honor of Michael Jackson, who had died just the day before. After the following song, I Know Sometimes a Man is Wrong, again the applause seemed endless.

"There's more," Byrne said, and indeed there was: in an amazing coup de theatre, the Extra Action Marching Band began descending from just below the ring of towering eucalyptus trees towards the stage down the center of the Greek. Already in a Dionysian frenzy, there were four girls in black wigs with bangs, shaking their silver pompoms and everything else, in skintight tiny white dresses with arm fringe; two gogo boys in tall black shakos and fringed tighty-whities, and two more waving silver flags; and an explosion of brass-playing and drum-toting musicians, too many to count while in the inexorable propulsive grip of We're on the Road to Nowhere, which turned into Burning Down the House. The suddenly wildly sexual stage show was even more startling and effective because of the rather sexless, more childlike dancing that had gone on before, as someone observed (okay, it was Vendela Vida, credit where credit is due). I had never heard of the Bay Area-based alternative marching band before (whom, it turned out, had collaborated with him before), and now I wanted to see one of their own shows.

Soothed by a simple acoustic version of Everything that Happens ("from the milk of human kindness, from the breast we all partake, hungry for a social contact"), the crowd floated out. We overheard, more than once, "This was the best concert I ever went to." It was certainly one of our favorites.

Critical bias: I was lucky enough to go backstage afterwards with a friend for a magical party, lit by huge glowing Chinese lanterns, and got to chat for a bit with a similarly glowing (but not-at-all huge) David Byrne, who looked surprisingly slender after his outsized performance onstage. Since the tour started last September and is scheduled to continue through August, I asked him if I was mistaken in thinking that tonight's crowd, which had stopped the show twice, had been especially demonstrative. "No, " he said, "it was an amazing evening. Tonight the audience was the star!" I didn't think so, but it was nice to hear that he'd also had a good time.

[stuff & nonsense]

I know I keep mentioning DB's journal ... the old saying that if you throw enough mud at a wall some of it will stick, comes to mind.

This is ALWAYS worth reading.

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

[stuff & nonsense]

I know I keep mentioning DB's journal ... the old saying that if you throw enough mud at a wall some of it will stick, comes to mind.

This is ALWAYS worth reading.

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

Lots of new, interesting reading about touring and the latest installation in London and the book and the charity auction on ebay, getting round the world on tour busses (yes, even egg heads have mental blanks with spelling!!)

Check out his cycling gear and click on the link under the photo!

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

[jac]

I will get around to reading it!

Cute ensemble - is that the Byrne tartan?