Between two recent songs – Dog’s Mind and Everybody’s Coming to My House – Byrne encourages everyone to vote “in every election they possibly can”. A huge swath of songs – Talking Heads songs, Byrne solo outings drawn from various periods, covers, collaborations – have all been subtly rescored to fit a show heavy on funk, fun, drama, shadowplay and a sprinkling of overt politics. This set, by contrast, is all grey and minimal and yet somehow just as kaleidoscopic. You can see the link to a previous Byrne outing – 2015’s US-only Contemporary Colour shows, since released as a film – which found Byrne reinterpreting the US sports pastime known as “colour guard”, where flag-spinners join marching bands for half-time performances. Pop is no stranger to troupe dancing, but working musicians don’t normally move this perfectly, rearranging themselves like psychic starlings into clumps or lines, posing, vogue-ing, proceeding backwards in circles choreographer Annie-B Parson is the architect of these manoeuvres. At the end of a lot of songs, he hoicks up his trousers – since the tour began, you can imagine Byrne has shed the odd pound.ĭavid Byrne and co in action at the Apollo. There are moments where Byrne gnomically ruches up his trouser leg to reveal an ankle, or rolls up his jacket sleeve to reveal an inner elbow. (The harnesses are so discreet, the keyboard player’s instrument appears to hover in mid-air.) Everyone is in (normal-sized) grey Kenzo suits and barefoot by the end, backing vocalist Chris Giarmo’s jacket is entirely black at the back, and Byrne’s own back is piebald with sweat. This unprecedented, exquisite live show finds a 12-strong band in near-constant motion, with percussion to the fore: at several points, half a dozen musicians are playing bits of drum kits hanging off harnesses they are wearing, a cross between an American high school marching band and a Brazilian carnival procession. “Because music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head.” Byrne explained his choice of Stop Making Sense’s outsized suit to an interviewer at the time as a device to make his head appear smaller.

Byrne’s youthful air of surprise has given way in recent years to a more professorial demeanour, to which he has recently added a foppish Andy Warhol haircut.īut one of the secrets of Byrne’s early success, mid-period extemporisations and absolute continued relevance is his devotion to rhythm. This tour is an artistic endeavour not far off Stop Making Sense’s high-water mark. Another film – the 1984 documentary, Stop Making Sense, about Talking Heads’ concept-heavy Speaking in Tongues tour – set an artistic benchmark so high few other films about music have ever come close. In the magnificent 2017 film, 20th Century Women, set in 1979, the band are referred to as “ art fags”. Byrne was, of course, once the frontman of a band called Talking Heads (and not, say, Grinding Hips), whose anxious, querying post-punk appealed to lateral thinkers.

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