There’s a really enlightening interview with one of my musical heroes, David Byrne, currently available on the BBC iPlayer (grab it while it’s hot – it won’t be around for long). Despite Matt Everitt’s annoyingly repetitive interview technique (pretty much every question begins with ‘What was your first…’), the usually recalcitrant Byrne offers up some nuggets that are new even to biog-reading Talking Headies like myself. Here’s what I learned.
1. David Byrne didn’t like Psycho Killer. It was a track that he wrote “mainly an exercise to find out if I could write a song… but that was an excercise… it wasn’t really me writing, it’s not the direction I wanted to go in. I wanted to write songs that were more me… but of course the one that was written just as a test became instantly very popular.”
2. The Velvet Underground made Talking Heads great. Well, kinda – Velvets refugee John Cale introduced Brian Eno to David Byrne in “a little club in Covent Garden,” and helped unleash the band’s golden era of Eno-produced albums. Incidentally, Talking Heads were in the UK supporting the Ramones – who were the first band they ever played with. That bill always confused me – the Heads’ art-funk next to the Ramones’ adrenaline punk.
3. The Beatles and Pink Floyd inspired David Byrne to go solo. Back in 1980, Byrne made his first solo album – the soundtrack to The Catherine Wheel, a dance performance by Tyla Thwarp. “There was no agenda,” Byrne tells Everitt. “You just got an invitation and you go ‘that sounds like a really cool thing to do. But I was aware that musicians in the past that I respected and admired had done things like that. Some of which maybe weren’t very commercially successful. Side projects in the late 60s that the Beatles and Stones had done, recording the Pipes of Pan in Jajuka. Or Pink Floyd had done some movie scores.” Byrne, of course, went on to win an Oscar for his soundtrack to Bertolucci’s 1987 film The Last Emperor.
4. David Byrne never liked electronic music. “Initially I didn’t [have an affinity with electronic music]. I thought it all seemed very cold. Brian Eno was very good at kinda warming it, up keeping all of the electronic, alien squiggly sounds going but humanising it so it didn’t sound completely sterile.” Byrne played a couple of tracks from his 1980 Eno collaboration My Life in a Bush of Ghosts on his recent tour, which I had the pleasure of catching at the Royal Festival Hall. The album pioneered the use of ‘found sound’, which soon became known as sampling – thus opening up whole new revenue stream for media lawyers.
5. Lazy used to sound like Life During Wartime. “The original Lazy track had more of a feel of [Talking Heads song] Life During Wartime, but with a housey feel. I sorta ignored that direction in my writing, and they completely reworked the track after I sent the vocal back to them. I’m glad they did that.”
6. David Byrne is a virtual DJ. Byrne streams three hours of music a month from his website. “There’s been a Gospel theme. Not too many months ago it was all Japanese music. And Danielle, a woman in my office, does this tracking thing. And she goes ‘David, look at this. The Arabic month we hit an all time low.” Which is not a good sign I suppose. She’s not encouraging me to make it more popular but she is saying “there’s some wild fluctuations in the listnership”.
7. David Byrne’s not a very successful visual artist. His first show was at at gallery at CBGBs coffee hosue and gallery. “I was faily quite about it… I expected the write ups would be ‘rock star thinks he’s an artist.’ And that was the reaction. I can’t say I’m a hugely successful gallery artist but I keep fairly busy doing things that show up in one form or another.” My favourite Byrne project: designing bicycle racks in New York. Such as the dog-shaped rack below. Really. 
David Byrne's bicycle rack design in NYC
8. David Byrne wants you to play the Roundhouse. After his headline gig at Big Chill festival this summer, David is bringing his ‘playing the building’ installation to The Roundhouse in London, where vistors can operate a keyboard that then makes music from parts of the building.
9. David Byrne is still working with Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook. After the brillaint Toe Jam collaboration - and it’s even better video (see bottom, and lots of it) – David Byrne is trying to complete the ’Here Lies Love’ project with Cook. It’s a disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos. Of course.
You can download the David Byrne interview as a MusicWeek podcast from iTunes or the 6music site – but I recommend listening to the version on BBC iPlayer because it’s packed with the music proves Byrne is such a genius. But it’ll only be available for a couple of weeks, so get over there soon.
