1989 - Third Degree Byrne
Written by 20/20
From 20/20 magazine, 1989 More than a Talking Head
David Byrne can talk happily for hours about Rock 'n' roll, Latin music or Afro-Cuban religion. Try asking him about the Talking Heads and suddenly you're playing with fire. Richard Guilliatt turns on the heat.
Like a post-mod God, it sometimes seems that David Byrne is everywhere. One month he's knocking out a cinema soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci, then he's down in Brazil shooting a documentary of Yoruba religious practices. One moment he pops up in the film 'Heavy Petting' to reminisce about teenage sex, next he's writing a two-hour orchestral soundtrack for playwright Robert Wilson, or hosting a night of Afro-Cuban religious music in the New York Town Hall, or putting the finishing touches to another Brazilian pop compilation. Last spotted. Byrne was bobbing around the back of rapper KC Flyte's 'Planet E' video, wearing a long overcoat and reprising his forehead-slapping jog/dance. It was hard to suppress the thought that, well, there you go, David being ironic again.
That KC Flyte song, which samples the gurgling funk of Talking Heads' 'Once In A Lifetime' and tops it with a surrealist rap about racial politicking, demonstrates exactly how far and fast pop has come since David Byrne first donned his horn-rimmed glasses and whacked himself on the head in the name of rock-vid posterity. The jump- cut lyrics and poly-rhythms of 'Once In A Lifetime' and Byrne's bespectacled nerd-aesthete image once signalled a quite radical shift in post-punk music. Nearly a decade later the song has become just another part of the pop lexicon, there to be sampled, cut-up and re- constructed by a new generation that has taken Byrne's own mutate-and-mix philosophy to extremes he might never have envisaged. Meanwhile the cool irony which Talking Heads helped make the defining philosophy of 1980s pop culture is being usurped by a movement that's already been dubbed Planet Pop, a world of Madonna rain-forest benefits, ideologically-sound World Peace ice-cream bars and electro-Israeli-hip-house dance hits.
Which is partly why we have 'Rei Momo', David Byrne's
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Written by 20/20 first solo pop album. Written and performed with the assistance of veteran Latin musicians such as Willie Colon, Johnny Pacheco, Yomo Toro, Celia Cruz and Ray Barretto, the album grafts Byrne's sardonic lyrics to the exuberant percussive chaos of Latin rhythms - salsa, merengue, samba, pagode and cumbia. It's one more step in the globalisation of pop, the only question being: will they understand it in Peoria, Illinois?
'I'm, uh, just not sure whether MTV are gonna like it,' says Byrne, watching the monitor screens at a midtown Manhattan video editing room one afternoon. His latest creation, the single 'Make Believe Mambo', is skittering across the monitor screen. Cameras jump-cut between Byrne's face held in black-and-white close-up and Latin dancers swirling to the single's infectious orisa rhythm, carried along by seven horns and eight percussionists. 'It's not really their kinda music ...' he murmurs.
Byrne's quiet, tremulous voice always seems to come from a great distance. Dressed like an off-duty lawyer - pale blue striped shirt, leather shoes and olive cotton pants - Byrne reaches into his satchel while the video is edited. He pulls out a couple of prepacked muffins wrapped in cling- film and starts munching while his eyes flip from screen to screen and his feet nervously pace the floor. Even though he's 37 and has a new-born infant daughter, it's hard not to think of Byrne as some overgrown art student still prone to delivering words like 'Gee!' in a voice that can suddenly lift in pitch as if he's about to cry in mid-sentence. In conversation his angular arms and legs still twitch and jump almost involuntarily, while a particularly curly question will create a 30-second pregnant pause during which his eyes flick rapidly from left to right as if reading an autocue somewhere in the distance.
Several of Byrne's Latino musical collaborators, whose boisterous warmth is as pronounced as Byrne's shyness, have been taken aback by the contrast between this stammering politeness and Byrne's animation in front of an audience or camera. 'He's like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' laughs Johnny Pacheco; with whom Byrne co-wrote three of his new songs. 'On stage he's a maniac!' On stage these days with his new 16-piece Latin band behind him, Byrne sports the zany grin of a novice gringo who's just been thrown in front of the Tito Puente orchestra and told to let rip.
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Maybe that's why so many of Byrne's songs celebrate weird and idiosyncratic behaviour, the new single being a case in point. 'I guess it's about the televisions and cinema generation of people in their mid-to-late adolescence (who) pick role models off the TV and cinema screen and imitate them.' Byrne explains. 'I thought rather than criticising that, I'd encourage it ... see what kind of strange mutated behaviour results. Rather than trying to give some stupid advice like a guidance counsellor: "You must be yourself", or whatever. Take the opposite path: be someone else.'
Byrne's egghead goofball persona - and his contribution to what Spy magazine called 'The Irony Epidemic' of the 1980s - reached its apotheosis in 1985 with 'True Stories', a movie that pretty much divided its audience between those who thought it was a sardonic tribute to middle- American wackiness and those who found it insufferably condescending towards the 'little' people it supposedly championed. Watching Byrne roam around Texas in a ten-gallon hat scattering non-sequiturs to be wind, it seemed he'd finally crossed the fine line between irony and glibness. But Byrne insists that he genuinely loves the kind of suburban American eccentrics that British people tend to regard as ...
'... a bunch of loonies? Yeah, there's a kind of nutty American creativity and boosterism that doesn't seem to have any kind of European model. It just seems that people who settled here have been cut free from their moorings, so in one sense it could kind of drift into dangerous a ctivities or attitudes and in others you're free to invent all kinds of things that no one else would have the audacity to do. I think it's a form of creativity. It just hasn't been sanctioned by highbrow critics.'
He does concede, however, that there came a point where, with his face spread over every available inch of magazine space, people had become sick of hearing about him. Once you've been pronounced 'Rock's Renaissance Man' on the cover of Time, a backlash cannot be far away. 'Uh-huh, I felt that as well,' says Byrne of the David Byrne overkill. 'I felt that I was talkin' too much, promoting too many things at once, or whatever.' He pauses, sitting on the couch in an editing room, and then shrugs. 'So I just cooled out. It was one of those things: you notice it,
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Written by 20/20 and that's that ... I had a bunch of stuff to promote and I was really excited about all of them. So I put the wheels in motion and that's what happened.
'I'm also aware - and this I don't know what to do about - I think people ... definitely a while ago were starting to think of me as being pegged as some kind of, uh, ah, I don't know what ... a pretentious, arty nerd or something. And there's probably a certain element of truth to that but,' Byrne laughs suddenly, 'I sure hope that's not all there is! It's one of those things where you use it as a persona in a film or video or whatever and it's the way people think of you. And it's hard to get yourself across as a whole human being.'
Ah, the lament of the pop artiste who wants to be appreciated as the earthy guy he is underneath. A whole lotta contortin' goes on when this particular dilemma raises its ugly head (usually in career mid-life) which is why we now have the unappetising sight of David Bowie writing songs about urban malaise and employing slam-dancers to jostle him in a video. Like Baltimore's other famous artistic son, film-maker John Waters, Byrne has seen the kind of trash-Americana aesthetic he championed become pandemic in recent years.
As for the future of Talking Heads, it's a subject that now seems to annoy the shit out of him. 'Rei Momo' is the first time he's made a commercial pop record outside the group and put a tour and promotional muscle behind it. The last time Talking Heads toured was five years ago with 'Stop Making Sense', a tour which saw the full flowering of Byrne's backstage perfectionism to the detriment of personal relations between the band's four members.
'It's true that we wouldn't want to do another tour that looked like that, that attempted to outdo it in the same kind of way. Uh ...' Byrne trails off into a 30-second silence that ends with a laugh, '... so, we didn't tour for a while.' Leaning forward and shuffling his feet in a nervous little dance under the table, Byrne says there are no immediate plans for a Heads reunion. Their long- term future as a band, however, seems assured, as they have just signed a new five-album contract with Sire records. 'To tell you the truth, I think we get along better and work together better when we're focused on making a record. It's harder for people to get along
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Written by 20/20 day after day on the road.'
Speaking to Byrne by telephone a couple of weeks after the interview at the editing room, it became clear that the band was not high on his list of priorities. The phone rang and Byrne's high uninflected voice was on the other end, sounding even weirder coming over the phone line. 'Hi-this-is-David Byrne-calling-to-answer- your-questions.' He was in the mid-West touring with his new Latin band and clearly ecstatic about the audience reactions. The audience wouldn't leave the hall,' he said of one gig. 'I had to go back on and explain we didn't have any more material.'
It's fair to say that Byrne's most recent projects - writing soundtracks for 'The Last Emperor' and Robert Wilson's play 'The Forest', compiling two Brazilian pop albums ('Beleza TropicaI' and the soon-to-be- released 'O Samba') and filming a one-hour documentary called 'Ile Alye' ('House of Life') about the Candomble Nago religion of Brazil - have taken him so far from the constraints of the Heads music that it's questionable whether they will retain their importance in his future work. His interest in tracing African culture from its roots to its musical and religions flowering In Latin America even caused Robert Farrie Thompson, the Yale University professor of Afro-American, to say that he is 'as much ethnographer as rock artist'. On its surface, 'Rei Momo' is the kind of cross-cultural thatching that has earned Byrne his reputation as a white boy paddling in the shallows of ancient black cultures. But Byrne's Latin musicians don't feel that way. The conga and drum player in his new hand, Milton Cardona, a priest of the Santoria religion (a variation of voodoo), says he has been impressed by Byrne's knowledge of deities and ceremonial practices in these Afro-Latin religions. 'There are certain things he knows that he wouldn't know unless he was getting into it deep,' says Cardona. 'I've had shells thrown to find out what my orisha is,' says Byrne of a Yoruba religious ceremony. 'I've made offerings and done that kind of thing. I believe that the religion holds a lot of truths and its attitude and sensibility seems to embrace all aspects of human living. It doesn't just say that religion or spirituality is just something where you are quiet or sombre. It can be sexy, for instance. 'I wouldn't go so far as to say
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Written by 20/20
I'm a convert espousing this religion or trying to convert people to it. But this religion and many others like it have been very much maligned as "casting of spells", all that kind of thing. People should hear what the religion is really about instead of having movies and TV tell them.'
The 'Rei Momo' band's debut in Poughkeepsie, in upstate New York, was one of those pan-cultural rock events that make you blink. Dressed all in white, the percussion-heavy 16-piece band was a set of swarthy faces behind Zapata moustaches, with Byrne gooning around our front occasionally breaking into his white- boy-goes-native jiggle. The fact that he only played one Talking Heads song did not seem to phase the audience at all. A middle-aged couple up the aisle bobbed cheerfully in their seats and some college jocks behind me discussed the difference between merengue and cumbia rhythm. Next to me was one of the new breed of American teen-hippies whose life was irrevocably changed when she listened to her parents' 'Woodstock' albums. 'I'm, like, totally psyched,' she said, spending most of the concert waving her arms in the air like palm fronds.
'I think one thing that's happened is that rock 'n' roll has had its influence,' says Byrne of the new global pop. 'It was this magical union of African rhythms and European melodic sense, all kinds of things came together and it just kind of snapped, and everybody who heard it all over the world got into it. But it did reach its peak, I think. I mean, people are shocked when they go to Indonesia or wherever and people are listening to the latest Eurythmics single. But I think now it's reached saturation point and people in those countries will assert their own culture, or take elements of rock or pop or whatever and put it in with their own stuff. The wave will start receding and all this other stuff will start coming in.'
Then the subject of Talking Heads comes up again, and Byrne's voice suddenly goes cold. 'You know, I have been asked these kinds of questions for ten years,' he says irritably. 'Since 1979 1 have been asked whether Talking Heads are splitting up.
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Written by 20/20
I couldn't give a shit any more, I really don't care, We have gone on and done work together. We have got back together and made wonderful albums. Who gives a shit? We'll do it when we feel like it.' Byrne sounds angry, a side of him that is normally kept out of view. 'I get sick of hearing it!' he says of the Talking Heads talk. 'Can you imagine being asked the same question for ten years?'
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