INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

New Musical Express DECEMBER 19-26, 1981 - by Ian Penman

BYRNE IN HELL

A Talking Head discusses art and religion and Bali and ballet with the very cultural Ian Penman

New York, November 29, 1981, 2.00 pm: Anton Corbijn and I arrive at David Byrne's spacious East Village loft after a considerable but not unpleasurable wait occasioned by impenetrable record company mismanagement. It's the Sunday after Thanksgiving - the date originally set for our interview - which Byrne had spent with his "folks in Baltimore".

The past eighteen months have seen Talking Heads' Remain In Light, their World Tour, the Byrne-Eno My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts collaboration, and now Byrne's own 'soundtrack' for the Twyla Tharp dance company's Catherine Wheel production. A Talking Heads double live retrospective is ready, the possible choices for its artwork spread out on something resembling a gym mat covering one half of the floor in Byrne's loft. Talking Heads are, it seems, poised on the course of recording another studio LP together (but without Brian Eno's assistance, one source in New York later advises me).

David Byrne loves ideas, life ystematized, the thrill of academic connection. He loves music, dance, the quarks of intuition. He dreams of making popular a music where the hypnotism of age-old attractions mingles with the magnetic discourse of his 'intellectual' eclecticism. He can appreciate the other world of something such as Gamelan (the ritual and music of Bali's religious orchestras), or the sweet modern siren of Chart soul, smart enough to realise that imitation isn't always the most faithful form of flattery. But David Byrne is perhaps sometimes too dazzled by the 'purity' of foreign bodies to know when his appreciation has overstayed its wisdom. At such times - times frequently aggravated by the helper's hands of another, obvious, culprit - David Byrne is an easy target. (David Byrne has the same initials as David Bowie).

But why should we be surprised if our popular "artists" occasionally take a wrong turning, or exceed, or under-achieve? These things should occur. Do we still pretend a belief in perfect codes, in unchained personality?

After all, the yearning for possession of knowledge is an essentially Romantic passion.

David Byrne laughs to himself.

• • •

We'd finished touring Japan and I'd gone off to Bali. I stopped in Los Angeles on the way back to New York and - I think this was in March - saw Twyla's company. I had recently done a couple of videos that had vaguely to do with putting dancing to music...

That includes the Once In A Lifetime video?

Yeah. And sol think that was on my mind - how dance should work with music, how ideally they should evolve together. I'd only been back in New York about a week and Twyla approached me about doing the music for a long piece that she was thinking of doing. I was thinking of either taking a long time to write some songs or working on something of my own anyway... and thought, well, this looks like a perfect opportunity to try out some of these ideas, and have a clear cut project for them, put them to some use. So I just went ahead and did it! It took a long time. It's the longest I've ever worked on any piece of music.

Is there any basic narrative or unifying concept behind it? Or did it just evolve haphazardly?

I didn't want to get involved in a narrative. I always think that music works best if it's a little bit vague; if it doesn't deal too directly with what you're dealing with, if it does that in a roundabout way. I talked to Twyla about that, we had lots of talks about how music and visual things should work together... According to some people there are some sort of plot lines in the dance piece, but it's pretty vague. There are a lot of people who are agonizing and bumping up against one another, everything is fairly tortured and agonised (smiles) until the end and then everyone sort of leaps about in a really ecstatic way...

So the concerns and problems were primarily aesthetic?

Yeah. I had the piece divided up into a lot of sections - where one group of dancers would come out and others disappear; I was timing all that, figuring out how long this part lasted, how many fast sections were there and how many slow sections were there, all that sort of thing. Gradually all the sections got filled in until there were.a few holes left and I had to do a few pieces really to order to fit a specific part of the dance.

In terms of how you approached making music... you didn't have to depart from your previous working methods too much?

No, I stuck to the same working methods that we'd all been using in the last year or two, although I think the results are a ittle bit different. Which is not surprising, I guess.

One particular device you use and have used before is the over-laying of various voices and sounds onto your own basic tracks. These tortured preachers and sinners and so on - is it simply a question of aesthetic finders keepers on your part, or is it meant to have a discreet cutting edge in these Moral Majority times?

It sort of fits both ways. It makes a comment in a literal way; the fact that their voices are impassioned means that it works very well with music that has some sort of energy to it. If you just took a straight narrative - somebody telling a story or something - and stuck it on top of an energetic or rhythmic piece of music it'd seem out of place in a way.

What comes first when you approach a song - subject, or rhythm, or just simply language itself?

Most of the time the words come last, although they may not be written last, they may be written simultaneously but separately - I just collect a lot of lyrics. I think usually I'll start with a rhythm or a texture in mind; sometimes a rhythm is a way of achieving a kind of texture... a lot of times I'll go after that instead of going after a specific melody. Which, to me, that's what music's been about in the last thirty years or so and it's more about that now than it ever was before. More about rhythm and texture and less about the topline melody...

Songs in the past before records and sophisticated recording were so common... you wouldn't be surprised to see someone trying to play She's A Bad Mamajama or something on the piano. It just seems that the songs aren't about that anymore.

Do you write dispassionately - selecting words, sentences, scraps - or do you get lost in language?

I'm impassioned about it... but at the same time I have to organise it, because undirected passion has no affect at all, it's just someone yellinginto the wind. Unless it's organised it's really ineffectual. So I have to take passionate outbursts or words and phrases that I think will be highly charged or I can sing in a highly emotional way and organise them, be dispassionate when I organise the song.

So would you say that you realise emotion indiscriminately, rather than in the traditional rock 'n' roll manner, where anger or passion or whatever is directed at one specific object?

Yeah... I think traditional rock'n'roll is one sort of romanticism that is valid, but it's not one that I find particularly interesting or that I think I'm very good at. I think there's a lot of other possibilities, so I guess I sort of ignore that one a little bit.

I've been trying to get a wider range of emotions in the stuff I've been doing and in Talking Heads' material, and I think I've succeeded a little bit - not always as much as I'd like to but a little bit.

I've just gone back and listened to a lot of our older stuff recently, since we've been mixing some old live tapes as well as newer ones, and I can really hear that I really did sound like someone... a really berserk person! (Giggles). And now I think at times I would go a little bit too far the other way, try to sound a little bit too dispassionate or too controlled. So! guess I should try to strike Some sort of balance between the two.

When the first person appears in your songs, what's that a way of confronting or avoiding?

You mean when I say "I"?

Yes.

I think really it's just a device, although it's very effective. You imagine the singer believes what they're saying, and it then helps you imagine yourself in that person's position. If songs were all sung in the third person it'd be a difficult task... it would make everybody seem like they were describing something that was very much outside them.

• • •

You once spoke - quite rightly I think - of "most rock'n'roll" as "a sort of personal explosion". Do you see your work in terms of a dispersal, a spreading out of energy... not in terms of identities but of forces, there not being one clear cut "I" but many?

Yeah, I think so. I think I do tend to do that but I think that can be really confusing for people as well. I think it's much easier if a band or a singer or whatever has one identity, they seem to have one character or one personality. If they start displaying too many facets of their character it can be confusing. I think I tend to do that. Can't help it, I guess. (Laughs).

I think it's realistic. People do have lots of facets to their character, they're not just one dimensional things.

I was thinking about the relationship between that and what can be found in places such as African or Balinese music, which attempt to reach a plateau and maintain that... rather than rock music, which-tends to go for peaks.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, recently I - have been working somewhat along those lines, but nowhere near as much as the musics from those cultures do. I'm still stuck with the four, five minute song - I still find that a comfort, I still find that a comfortable thing to work with. Whereas people in those cultures will go on playing for hours at a stretch, the same groove, on, but lots 9f variety and breaks in it; it'll evolve from one thing to another and go through a series of movements but it's essentially the same piece that lasts for hours. And I'm not used to that, you know.

I grew up with a three minute song... and I've worked my way up to six minutes or seven minutes, but that's about as far as I've got so far. But I suppose in the context of a pop song it is fairly different than a rock or a standard pop song.

Did you enjoy your stay in Bali?

Yeah, it was real nice. There's a lot of tourists in one end of the island, sort of hippies, but then the rest of the island is very much as it's always been. So! learnt to ride a motor bike, went off every day into the hills to see what was going on. Just about every day some village or other would be having a religious festival or a performance, so it wasn't very hard to just stumble on whatever was going on.

Has your introduction to such cultures affected not only your music but your attitudes towards day-to-day living?

I find it has almost no effect whatsoever on the music that we're doing. it has effects on my attitude towards the way that music can work in society, the way it can be performed and the attitudes toward performance. But I have no inclination at all to try to do an imitation of Gamelan.

So how has it altered those attitudes?

It just made me think about it, but I'm not sure how to put those things into action. One thing it immediately made me think about was that it's OK to dress up and it's OK for girls to wear make-up... I guess in the '60s we were all made to feel that make-up and getting dressed up for an occasion was sort of being untrue to yourself or something like that. And I think it's a little ritual and it's very important and it shouldn't be ignored.

I think at some period we were lead to believe that all these things like rituals were for primitive people and that us with our science could get rid of all that, and ignore it. What winds up happening is we just end up inventing new ones that substitute for the old ones - like rock concerts, for example.

• • •

On Remain In Light you seemed to be pushing away from the hypothetical three or four minute pop songs we were taking about earlier. Will that continue, what will be the next ...?

I had a talk with Chris and Tina a couple of weeks ago... and whether or not we'll do it I don't know, but we were talking about going back to a more traditional song form, working within that idiom and yet still using all the things we've learned after we broke away from that.

Which means that it might be shorter songs; I don't know how it'll work out, we haven't started rehearsing yet.

Do you see yourself in any particular tradition? In a lot of your earlier songs the language is pure enough for them to be regarded as folk song - taking things which are normally regarded as quite humdrum and poeticising them, getting quite passionate about them...

Yeah, I'm not sure exactly... that's a good question. I'm not sure what kind of tradition we belong to; we've sort of stuck ourselves in pop music and we're in that business and yet we and a lot of other bands in the last five years or so, I'm sure none of us really feel like we're continuing a tradition of that music. We probably all feel like we snuck in here, snuck into the business and we haven't been found out yet.

Of course the other thing you bring to it is your Art background - that's another discipline, another aspect that wasn't there before in the Pop tradition...

Uh huh. But even if it wasn't that, I think it's the fact that none of us were skilled musicians, we hadn't played around for ten years and then all of a sudden had a hit. I think that's true for a lot of bands.

What sort of function do things like the Once In A Lifetime video serve?

I wanted to make something that worked on its own, wasn't just a promo thing, didn't rely on the fact that it was a pop group or that you knew the song. Because it's always been thought that anything that's shorter than a half hour is just a promotional device for something else, a glorified ad for the record or the group... having very little value on its own, so the TV stations and the clubs all get these things for free. They're helping you to sell your records - why should we pay you to show a three minute ad?

I think they're quite right about that, but some things might hold up on their own. But I'm not sure how that could be worked out, there might have to be a different category... something like the way ASCAP and BMI and the,performing rights societies work, so the TV Stations and clubs pay a small fee every time they air something, the same way a radio station pays a small fee every time they play a record.

Who was the character in the ill-fitting suit in the Once In A Lifetime video?

It was meant to be a rural preacher. I had looked at a lot of films and read a bit about rural preachers and speaking in tongues and that sort of thing - the general phenomenon of religious ecstasy. So a lot of the movements were taken from that - I just thought, take some of these movements and abstract them, choreograph them, make it into a sort of spastic dance.

How do you view America's current shift back to mass religion, and simultaneously back to the South and Southern values? It seems to be a religion very much against ecstasy...

It goes back even further, it goes back to the very strict Protestants and Calvinists that came over from Britain to this country. These people were outcasts; even in Europe they were thought of as being too freaky. These people had the opinion that the Middle Ages were mankind's heyday (giggles)... they wanted to return to that.

Did you yourself have a religious upbringing?

No, not very much at all. I mean, I went to Sunday School for a little while but it was no way near what some of these people have.

What sort of upbringing did you have? Pretty liberal, or...

Yeah, pretty liberal.

Did you always tend towards the Arts?

No, I vacillated between the Arts and Science. I still have a lot of interest in scientific academic kind of things. But Art School seemed like a lot more fun, as it must do to a lot of people who choose that route. I guess a lot of people just go to Art Schoo! because they can't bear the thought of regular school. Not that they particularly want to make Art a career...

What did you do there?

Every few months I'd switch to another area, photos to video to conceptual art... I was just wandering around. I guess, so I never did get a degree.

No degree?

No, I didn't feel like that was the point - a degree from Art School, unless it was in a trade. A degree in Fine Arts wouldn't be of any use anyway.

"Art" should be of use in its society?

I think good art is of use in society, even Fine Arts - I don't mean just designing cups and saucers. I think in some sense it takes the place of religion for a lot of people - it provides that function, it it works.

Going back to the big religious awakening in the United States, I would guess that it's just because people here are a little bit lost... like they've been tossed out in a boat without any Oars. Everyone needs some sort of structure to base life and their decisions and their morality on, whether it be a really strict religion like the Moral Majority folks, or some sort of cult like Hari Krishna or whatever...

What provides that for you? You seem very preoccupied with systems, with what might loosely be termed Systems Art...

Yeah, I think that since I work in the 'creative' world or whatever, music ... that becomes my religion. I have to make it up as I go along, but believing intensely in the power of music. I'm probably really naive in that, but that's what keeps me going.

How do the systems you're involved in compare to what people would see - rightly or wrongly - as other 'systems' music, whether it be Kraftwerk or John Cage... or indeed, it could probably be extended to something like Motown.

Yeah, but it's not very explicit in something like Motown, it's very well hidden - which I think is as it should be. You should be aware that there's an order and a structure there, but that shouldn't be in the forefront I don't think; they're just a foundation of what finally occurs. The Motown people did some amazing things sometimes. They'd use the same basic tracks for a few different songs (giggles)... and they'd make hits out of all of them!

Do I detect a tinge of envy there?

Yeah! It's just one of those feelings you constantly run across; that, well, people have done it before you, you can't top that!

• • •

Is New York your ideal place of residence?

I guess I like New York for now... but it seems like this country's making all the wrong decisions about everything. I don't know how long I'll be able to live in a country that does that! It seems like if they persist in that, pretty soon all these ridiculous things they're doing are gonna catch up with them.

New York's just a little bit part of the country but it can't help but be affected. In fact, New York will be one of the most affected. The Federal Government doesn't much like New York! (Laughs) I just heard the other day that Los Angeles gets as much back in funds as they pay in taxes, whereas New York gets about half as much back as they pay in taxes. That doesn't seem fair to me!

Have you read anything you liked recently?

I've been reading a lot of mythology books, generally it's been books where the writer's been attempting to relate it to people's behaviour today. I read some other books vaguely in the area of socio-biology, where they claim that a lot more of people's behaviour is genetically determined than was thought before. And that seems plausible to me, up to a point. If someone takes that idea too far it becomes ridiculous, like saying your genes determine what you feel like eating every day. But then on the other hand they've managed to describe how in a roundabout way genes can determine the kind of social institutions people tend to form... which also relates back to mythology.

It seems like the same kind of myths seem to recur in every culture throughout history, over and over again - at least, ones that are fairly similar. It seems like if certain kinds of myths that people live by are discounted - for instance, religion - it's like cutting people's foundations away from them and they start floundering around searching for some other kind of foundation that they use to guide their living; EST or psychoanalysis or whatever. Maybe not so much now, but it was real popular in this country.

How come, do you think, psychoanalysis and people going to shrinks never caught on in Britain the way it did here? It was just so popular here! I didn't know about it till I went to college and met a lot of people with backgrounds different from my own. And I was surprised that parents had sent their kids to psychologists when they were in high school, when they were teenagers. Jesus, it's...

I think maybe in Britain there's still at least a residual feeling of community, that community is stressed and cherished more than the individual.

Yeah, there's a real emphasis on the individual here. Fix yourself, be strong, go out and kill a bear!

And the search to find out who you are, who you really are, which doesn't really drive a lot of people in Britain. The community thing surfaced this summer in the riots... whereas even America's Moral Majority shift back to family and community values is dominated by big personalities like Reagan and Falwell.

I just read a real long article on Falwell. Someone asked him Where do you stand politically? and his answer was Politically, I'm to the Right of wherever you are. (!)

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