I was delighted and excited to pick up a late resale ticket on the day of this concert from the 'Who is the Sky' tour. That spoof Madison Avenue voice, a shock of white hair and the Norman Bates mien and 74 year old David Byrne was on stage at the Edinburgh Playhouse 50 miles from where he was born! A photographic tableau vivant behind him and surrounded by no less than twelve musicians and dancers, like Byrne himself, all sporting orange jump suits, and gyrating groovily across the space. It was a pot pourri mishmash of the Playschool Teletubbies, old Benetton ads, that Jaguar advert that almost finished the company off and the inside of Doc Brown’s head from Back to the Future. It all felt very modern with no drum kits, just four percussionists wearing their electronic drums on their hips on shoulder straps. Byrne fades in and out of a stage choreography which he has described as 'democratised' because it makes prominent at different times other musicians. He treats us to his trademark, appealingly Wordsworthian, childhood wonder and his Gregor Samsa-like bafflement on encountering that human condition thing. And, as you’d expect, musicianship of the highest order and highest discipline was a delight. The classic songs that I knew, And She was, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, The Road to Nowhere and Psycho Killers were all performed with a tight swagger and arresting visual interplay between the onstage complement and the video backdrop. I'll just mention, and you will be staggered, Dear Reader, that, completely unexpectedly for an American Rock musician living in New York, Byrne felt moved to communicate his political credentials to us! Imagine my wonderment! The word FASCISM was given a prominent namecheck in connection with footage of Italians singing to each other from balconies on Liberation Day during Covid (there were a strange number of references to the Covid era). David explained for us that the liberation was from Fascism that happened in Italy don’tchaknow? He told us that showing kindness and love is the most punk thing you can do at the moment and the way to ‘resist.’ There followed footage of clumsy ICE myrmidons clutching vainly at a wacky young fellow on a strange bike-like contraption running their gauntlet and getting away. We cheered. Oh how we cheered! Then he asked us to guess which member of the band had a degree in Astrophysics and took delight in inviting a black female to step forward and give us a twirl. We also learnt that four members of the roadie crew were home-schooled but were marvellous anyway. And, finally, a hoarding reading ‘MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN!’ was projected. Which brings us back to the Teletubbies mentality and the infantile packaging. Did I discover that, appealing as the music is, it is really the juvenilia of a 75 year old man who is still producing it and that this was the answer to Qu’est-ce que c’est? that I hadn’t realised until now? Perhaps I'm being too harsh on an extremely talented artist...
Managed to catch a wee video of Psycho Killers. I thought this stuff was the dog’s bollocks when it came out.
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