Audio Journal : 21/01/2011

There is a moment during the the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar, documenting his 2008/9 tour, where his occasional collaborator Brian Eno describes the music they made on the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. 'Dread and promise,' says Eno sagely, and it is an apt description of that album's music. Earlier this week I was listening to this album and was struck by a peculiar quality to the title track; it simultaneously has an elegiac quality but also a sadness, a reflectiveness that somehow takes the edge of the euphoria. Hearing Eno offering his thoughts on the album's unique quality suddenly made the music make complete sense. Less charitably, Eno further went on to say that words are less important to a song than the atmosphere, something that Byrne seems to bristle visibly at stood next to Eno in the NYC offices of his Todo Mundo business. 'I put a lot of effort into those songs!' he laughed in the simulcast interview from Brixton with Paul Morley broadcast after the screening of Ride, Rise, Roar.



I think I have what can only be described as an 'artistic crush' on Byrne, which as a resolutely hetrosexual person possibly requires some explaining. Over the past few years I have become totally obsessed with Byrne's myriad outputs; his work with Talking Heads (of course), his solo work, his books, instrumental soundtracks, the Playing The Building installation at The Roundhouse and his artwork. For Christmas I received a signed print of his Roots Of War In Popular Song (Forest Of No Return), which has pride of place on my office wall. There isn't a thing that Byrne does that doesn't interest me. When I read Bicycle Diaries I wanted to buy a bike again. This blog partly came about because I liked the open-minded way that his is written.

I was supposed to go and see Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall as part of this tour, but I sold the ticket. It's a funny thing, regret; there are many, many things from years gone by – pivotal moments, opportunities lost and foregone – of far greater significance that I should regret more, but selling that ticket ranks as one of the biggest. Ride, Rise, Roar – though not a straight documentary account of something as mundane as a single concert date from that tour – is probably the nearest thing to a simulacrum of seeing that show I stupidly decided to sell my ticket for. By combining concert footage with behind-the-scenes footage you get to see the process of creating the performances live; it's a more studied approach to the notion, which I admit you wouldn't necessarily consider were this to be a concert film proper.

'Boredom is the great motivator,' said Byrne to Morley after, half jokingly trying to explain why the tour to accompany Everything That Happens Will Happen Today included three individual choreographers, unusual dance routines for what he still describes as a 'pop' show and the whole gang wearing tutus for the incendiary rendition of 'Burning Down The House'; attempting to explain why the shows couldn't be a straight pop concert; explaining why the Hillman Curtis film was a blend of concert footage interspersed with black and white footage of rehearsals, interviews with the three choreographers, dancers, his manager ('I hope this works,' he said nervously of the tour), Byrne himself and others.

In the following interview Byrne refused to draw too many comparisons with his other artistic 'concert' film, the Jonathan Demme-directed Stop Making Sense, though Morley felt it an obvious reference point. The awkward, geeky Byrne of the Eighties is undoubtedly still there – the jerky movements, the jogging to the infectious 'Life During Wartime', the vaguely detached delivery - but the focus of the shows appeared to be as much on the unusual choreography as this nominal front-man role. Everyone wore white. Everyone had to learn the moves. When the various talking heads (pun intended) described the dancers, backing vocalists and musicians on the stage as the 'chorus' you could see what sort of contemporary theatricality Byrne was after; not the over-the-top drama of, say, a Rufus Wainwright, but the distilled interpretation of the music and lyrics. That was best illustrated by hearing one chorographer explain how she built a whole sequence from the line 'The world moves on a woman's hips' from Remain In Light's 'The Great Curve'. I once saw the Michael Clark company do something similarly interpretative with Wire at the Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

Of course it's no substitute for seeing the show I sold my ticket for; hell, it wasn't even a substitute for watching Byrne and Morley speak in person at the Brixton cinema from where they broadcast the interview to cinemas across the country, but I suspect watching Ride, Rise, Roar on a tiny cinema screen in Leicester Square with about ten other people is as close as I'll get for now.