A Composer of Pleasure: David Byrne
The Times, December 1 1989
By Steve Turner

What do you think you are best at? David Byrne, neat in a blue button-down collar shirt and college athlete's haircut, looks nervously into the distance, as if expecting an answer to be beamed to him by a passing satellite. His head twitches. His eyes swivel.

In fact, this is probably what David Byrne is best at: appearing to be an alien lost on Earth. Most rock and roll musicians pretend to have been born on the wrong side of the tracks. Byrne pretends to have been born on the wrong side of the universe.

Our questions puzzle him and human behaviour, as observed in his songs with Talking Heads, he finds fascinating. He dances as if his body doesn't function well in our atmosphere. He is out of place, and proud of it.

Twelve years after the first Talking Heads album, Byrne's career continues to fascinate. Trained at Rhode Island School of Design, where he developed a special interest in conceptual art, he is one of the few stars of rock and roll not bound by the medium.

He has written music scores for film, ballet and theatre as well as having acted and directed for cinema and video. For his contribution to the soundtrack of The Last Emperor he received an Academy Award. Consistently he has displayed a knack of staying one step ahead of trends in popular culture.

A decade ago his work with Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts anticipated the current mania for sampling and mixing. The African influence which began with Fear of Music anticipated the gathering interest in world music.

So, with the release of his first solo project, Rei Momo, an album suffused with the rhythms of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Brazil, has the alien picked up another trend?

It's no use asking him. His standard answer to questions of 'why?' are 'because it feels good', or 'it gives me pleasure'. This, he says, is the reason he has chosen to play smaller venues as David Byrne, with a 15-piece Latin American band and why he hasn't toured with Talking Heads for five years.

'Talking Heads gave me more money, but less pleasure, ' he explains. 'The time comes to do something that feels better.' What he doesn't say is that Talking Heads have just signed another five-album contract and that the Rei Momo tour, largely underwritten by the same record company, has been made possible only by the promise of more Heads products.

His interest in Latin music began in the clubs of New York but was heightened last year by a visit to Brazil where he directed an hour-long television documentary on rituals involving music.
He now regards Afro-Latin rhythms as magical. In the sleeve notes to O Samba, his second compilation of Brazilian classics, he makes connections between the floating down-beat and sub-atomic particle physics, spirituality, the womb, Mother Earth and conservation. 'To shake your rump, ' he claims at one point, 'is to be environmentally aware.'

At La Cigale, a 1,200 capacity club in the seedy Pigalle district of Paris, the rumps that were shaking were mostly those of the grinning, white-clad Latino musicians who co-ordinated their movements as they blew their trumpets and beat their drums. The audience, for the most part, looked more curious than environmentally aware.

Byrne, at times, seemed like a white tourist who had climbed on stage at the Rio Intercontinental to sing a selection of his songs with the house band. He regained his authority only on numbers such as 'Dirty Old Town', 'Make Believe Mambo' and 'Independence Day'.

He admits that the clash of style between Latin exuberance and his own deadpan delivery interests him, although he professes to displaying more emotion in his new lyrics and to feeling 'pretty ecstatic' on stage. 'I think I'm less conceptual than I used to be, ' he says.

Since 1979 Byrne has pursued the connection between music and states of transcendence and between ritual and religion. He has attended voodoo ceremonies and Pentecostal church meetings. The voyage to Brazil to investigate the Candomble Nago religion was just the latest chapter of the inquiry. But what is he hoping to find?

'I think it's a huge part of where our popular music comes from, ' he says. 'I believe that the reason rock 'n' roll has had the influence and power it has is because it carries a small part of that energy with it. A very small part maybe, but I think it's what makes it different from Perry Como or Frank Sinatra or whatever.'

Yet the power of music to change consciousness appears to have more to do with the meaning invested in it by the participants than the rhythmic structure. What causes eyeballs to roll in the Brazilian jungle may only cause shoes to shuffle in Paris.

Byrne agrees. He offers the example of his drummers who the day before had been playing to African deities in their dressing room. 'They were sacred rhythms, but no one is about to get possessed in a back room of La Cigale, ' he says. 'But in the right context it could happen.'

His musicians on the Rei Momo tour are mostly accomplished New York-based session men with the exception of Margareth Menezes, a young vocalist from Brazil. Byrnes's songs have been Latinized by percussionist Milton Cardona and arranged by musical director Angel Fernandez.

The musicians are diplomatic when discussing Byrne's talents. 'He has a different voice, ' explains Menezes through an interpreter. 'It's a sound that is really personal.'

A Brazilian drummer known as Cafe says: 'He's different. I think he does something. I don't say it's new, but it's new-spirited.'

So what is David Byrne best at? Is he a musician? Is he a conceptual artist? 'I don't think I'm a musician in the sense of a virtuoso player, ' he says after a long pause. 'There are much better guitar players or singers or whatever.'

He leaves it at that, hoping the question won't come back. But it does. This time the pause is longer. 'I guess it's .. it's .. something else.' He laughs at his inability to articulate.

'It's sort of composing. Whether it's on film or whether it's with music, I take the same kind of attitude. Yeah. I guess you could say I am a composer.'

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