Third Degree Byrne

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 1 / 7 1989 - Third Degree Byrne 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. 2 / 7 1989 - Third Degree Byrne Written by 20/20 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, 3 / 7 1989 - Third Degree Byrne 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, '..

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