David Byrne: Metamorphosis Machine

"His success is the revenge of every nerdy art school geekboy"

Making music from architecture

Ever changing and ever challenging, David Byrne has metamorphosed his way far beyond the paradigm of the Talking Heads frontman that made him a rock star of his day. Since then, he has morphed and changed and cross-pollinated across the worlds of design, dance, theatre, film, opera, ballet, politics and writing.

Pushing the cultural envelope

His beautifully ambiguous approach to the banal and the obvious, with an incessant eye to pushing the cultural envelope, makes him one of the biggest artists of our time. To call him a Renaissance man would be trivial. To say he’s a punk icon would be boring. Byrne is More. A Lot More. What follows is a tribute of sorts. Knowing that I had interviewed David Byrne several times starting in the original CBGBs days, a producer asked me to contact him about a TV show. “Not that he wants to be rude,” came the response, “but right now David can only answer questions posed to him by email.”

“What can he possibly be so busy with?” wondered my bemused producer. In some ways, this story answers that understandable question. David Byrne is the rock star who dares to voyage into areas most of his colleagues barely know exist - and makes out like a polymath gangsta, being not only credible but actually popular, as in bums on seats, in all these different disciplines.

Grrr, grrrr, grrrr. How does he do it?

Let's set the download straight. To paraphrase Byrne's recent collaboration with his old cohort, Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Not Happen in this article.

Is this a simple puff piece?

Is this a tough inquisition?

Is it worthy of a tree dying in a far-off forest?

Dear reader, you decide.

Defying boundaries

For the ordinary is both David's despair and his delight. Really, he relishes banality in the ‘bizarre’ encounters of his True Stories movie, his outsize suit in Jonathan Demme's ‘Stop Making Sense’ concert film, his oddly fascinating photo series of corporate street address signs and global lighting fixtures – and, indeed, in decades of his faux-naif lyrics.

In truth, this article is simply a whimsical piece of the rock-lit pie, a delectation of davidata, a bouquet of the particular qualities (those bright blooms) that have enabled David Byrne to waft past the paradigm of the pop star and cross-pollinate the worlds of design, dance, theatre, movies, massive-scale live performance, opera, ballet, civic action, record labels, literary publishing.

And then, still, there’s the music.

"The ordinary is both David's despair and his delight."

But in the beginning is the idea. And that’s where Byrne scores. The reach, the breadth – yes, Byrne has manifested many dreams. His success is the revenge of every nerdy art school geekboy scrabbling through thrift store racks for a look that shows he means business, his way. Without Byrne, where would those polished po’ boys Hedi Slimane or Thom Browne be?

Along with fellow new-wave scallywag Richard Hell, who wrote BLANK on his forehead before Prince scrawled SLAVE on his own dome, David Byrne almost invented the twitchy, underfed rock poet look of the ’70s.

At first Byrne was famously gawky with Tourette’s style co-ordination. But after a long association with the late-lamented dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, Byrne blossomed so much that on his recent tour, revisiting his post-punk partnership with Brian Eno, he sported a tutu over trousers. Tending towards the asexual rather than androgynous, Byrne succeeded in making the tutu seem fanciful but functional rather than camp drag.

When offstage, in keeping with his pioneering of understated geek chic, the soft-spoken Byrne eschews SUVs. Low-key, almost self-effacing, he zips around Manhattan and the globe on his trusty bicycle. He enjoys being a comparatively anonymous habitue of rock‘n’roll dives, prone to hanging cool in the shadows. When I last ran into him – at the old Knitting Factory or maybe SOB’s – he seemed happy to see a face familiar from the early Talking Heads days. “I don’t understand why I never see more people from back then out at shows now,” he commented in a bemused sort of way.

Yeah, well, that’ll be because most people your age have A) acquired the trappings of domesticity that require staying home, or B) simply can’t stay up that late any more, now that the drugs don’t work, or C) are so ‘been there, done that’ they’re simply OVER the live experience. Dunraving. So in this matter of raving on, white hair notwithstanding, Byrne breaks the mould yet again.

But that’s what we expect of D.B.

The unexpected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It’s beautifully predictable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wind him up and watch him go off in a new and intriguing direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hear David tick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

See David do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

Thank you for purchasing this rock star robot!

Inside the box you will find a fully flexible figure with photogenic features. Also included are four interchangeable wigs: the Punk, the Braids, the Number One Cut and the Dreadlocks (Bob Marley Robot only). The healthy ego in this kit can be expanded by visiting our website for a small fee. The voicebox has adjustable pitch and auto-tuner. The Rock Star’s Audio & Video Product is located beneath the Robot in the sealed compartment.

Note: The only Rock Star Robot in the series with a larger box containing additional Product compartments is the David Byrne Rock Star Robot. In addition to the audio and video material available with the other Robots in the Rock Star series, please also find:

1: The Blogger

In the true punk tradition, there’s no rock star mystique here. Tear away those minder/PR veils! Find out all you want to know about the inmost workings of Byrne’s brain with his refreshingly frank, free-form blog on davidbyrne.com. Rants include musings and minutiae on both his work and his daily round and life as D.B. lives it.

2: The Radio Guy

Byrne has always been an aficionado of the unexpected in music, and his individual aesthetic has found a perfect outlet in his own internet radio station, handily located on his website:
a well laid out and archived voyage into his mesmerised mind.

3: The Athlete

An ardent cyclist, David always wears his helmet. (Not included. Available on website.)

4: The Author

Who says publishing is shrinking? Not our man D.B. Here, once again, cycling oxygenates the man’s myth. His recent, much-lauded memoir/mediation/exploration, Bicycle Diaries, is the most conventional of Byrne’s literary works. Mostly Byrne books double as bijou gallery-ready artefacts, like the Power-Point project, ‘E.E.E.I. Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information’, which comes complete with DVD. (Not included in this package.)

5: The Designer

A dropout of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, Byrne has never stopped imagining. Once again, those beloved wheels carry him far out – New York is now dotted with cheery D.B. bike racks, oversize bent metal animal silhouettes, reminiscent of Keith Haring. Generally Byrne’s designs tend to the playfully simplistic, from his chair that resembles a wine-bottle opener, to the ‘Aliens’ espresso coffee set he designed for Illy. Fans of Tony Hancock’s masterpiece movie, The Rebel, will see some artistic link with Hancock’s Shapeist School of Art – every colour is a different shape.

6: The Activist

Not only does Byrne use his wheelie habit to feed his endless enthusiasm and curiosity about the people and places he encounters, his love of bikes has engaged him in politics. Money from the auction of the bike used during Bicycle Diaries went to the London Cycling campaign.

7: The Entrepeneur

Putting his money where his mouth is, Byrne founded the world music label Luaka Bop in 1988. Since then, of course, the whole industry has devolved into a stormy sea of post-internet anarchy. But the integrity of Luaka Bop, expressing Byrne’s eclectic
taste, was a consummate lifejacket. Though no longer strictly indie, its catalogue expresses independent ideals. Arguably no individual has done more than Byrne to curate and distribute little-known aspects of the African Diaspora, notably the sounds of Afro-South America, like Peruvian singer Susana Baca.
Byrne’s bent for psychedelic stylings and electronica has also coloured us outsiders’ understanding of the sounds of Brazil with individualistic artists like Tom Zé

8: Performance Person

Byrne is a top go-to dude for large-scale performance pieces, such as his nifty interactive extravaganza ‘Playing the Building’. Using a vintage organ, Byrne creates a full-on mechanical orchestra. A cat’s cradle of leads connect the organ to the various pipes and beams that make the building tick – and, when played by members of the audience, thump, rattle and hiss as well – in a charmingly atonal, eerily lugubrious anti-melody. Presenting it recently at the Roundhouse, in London, D.B. noted gleefully that he played there with the Talking Heads and the Ramones when punk was just starting in 1976. It was nicely circular, returning as a museum-quality artist to the venue where he’d learned first-hand about ‘gobbing’ – and the advantages of the Ramones’ thick leather jackets.

9: The Musician

Byrne’s own musical discoveries have shaped his musical path. In the beginning, of course, he helped make punk funky with the Talking Heads. Ferociously, his jagged neuro-rock rode Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s rhythms, firing off lyrics with the crisp, confusing clarity of a painting by Magritte. A turning point came with 1981’s My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, when he and Eno fused ancestral African rhythms with then-futuristic wistful electronica. Now the groove globe is D.B.’s playpen as he romps freely through the Afro-Latino diaspora. It only works because his oblique, saturnine persona is so distinctive that he doesn’t drown in his mixed beats.

10: The Collaborator

Slightly nasal and with occasionally eccentric pitching, Byrne’s vocals are not conventionally pretty as he’d be the first to agree. But his idiosyncrasies and oddly titillating lyrics make him a much-desired guest and collaborator. Ever inquisitive and receptive, Byrne is open to all sorts of encounters. He’s messed with dramatist Robert Wilson and choreographer Twyla Tharp. His input helps shape tastemakers like Thievery Corporation, the Brazilian Girls and N.A.S.A. As I write, according to his online journal, Byrne’s completing the recorded version of Here Lies Love, his musical knee-trembler with Fatboy Slim about Imelda Marcos. Latterly he has been working with hipster Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors on ‘Knotty Pine’. Jams with Jay-Z and Dizzee Rascal show that D.B. appreciates a ruffer counterpoint to his urgent, tremulous alto. A personal favourite is the exquisite Last Emperor film soundtrack, on which he mingled melodies with Japanese classical futurist Ryuichi Sakamoto. But D.B.’s most sustained partnership is with uber-producer Brian Eno. A quarter century or so after they revolutionised pop with My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, it’s quite touching that the Byrne/Eno axis is back. So kudos then, to these musical life partners for their haunting Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

If any of the above Products are missing from this Robot, please contact us via our website and quote Catalog number T.I.T.O./RSR/D.B.

A Coda:

Hey People, I’m thinking of including this answer D.B. gave us at the press conference for the Roundhouse ‘Playing The Building’ in the D.B.R.S.R. package. It makes him likeable and I think will add value to the D.B. Robot. What do you reckon?

Is there a consistent thread running through your various endeavours and if so, what is it?

D.B: I’ve started thinking that there’s a kind of populist thread, I guess you could say. Most of this stuff I do, I think it’s not meant to be obscure or difficult. It’s meant to be something that’s accessible to kind of ordinary folks. Like these bicycle racks that I did for New York City – it’s all meant to be very [easy] for everybody to understand what it’s about. That doesn’t mean, for example, [that] the music I make is meant to be the lowest common denominator of popular; in the same way that this installation is not going to appeal to absolutely everybody. But it doesn’t go out of its way to push you away – it kind of welcomes you. All my stuff sort of welcomes the ordinary person in and says, “No, there’s nothing scary about this.” There’s nothing about it that says, “We’re better than you.”