Independent on Sunday, 2 August 1992

David Byrne live at Brixton Academy

By Ben Thompson

Person for person, the audience that welcomes
David Byrne onstage at the Brixton Academy
probably has more letters after its name than
any other in the venue's history, but the
atmosphere is more akin to a revival meeting
than a post-graduate tea party. And small wonder.
Excluding the basic Latin crash-course that was
his "Rei Momo" outing, this is Byrne's first
proper British tour for 10 years. His old band
Talking Heads have fallen silent in the meantime,
but that just makes it all the more certain that
the promise of some wiry old favourites is a
bigger factor in the sky-high expectations of
a packed house than the supple thrills of salsa
and mambo.

Byrne emerges alone, looking intense and elegant
as ever in a black jacket, cut expensively short
in the manner of a Come Dancing Flamenco champion.
Lit by a solitary hanging lantern, and with just
a guitar and beat-box for company, he works
through a mixed bag of his own and other people's
material: a low-grade Captain Beefheart remnant,
a fine "Nothing but Flowers", a slightly hysterical
"Road to Nowhere". The frivolous "Girls on my Mind",
keynote of the new album Uh-Oh, brings the curtain
down on the lone-wolf prologue.

Except it doesn't. The curtain gets stuck, greatly
diminishing the impact of the crowd's first
sighting of the backing troupe. This is a shame
because they look great, beautifully lit in a
series of starkly shifting shadows. Their sound
though is not so crisp. They strike up loudly with
"Mr Jones"; the horn section are fantastic, but
somewhere deep in the rhythm section something is
amiss. World musicians (where do non-world
musicians come from?) can miss beats too. Byrne's
frustration is obvious, and peaks when his guitar
conks out. As he rips frenziedly at the tangled
leads, for a few moments the famous manic exterior
slips to reveal a seriously manic interior.

Crossed cultural wires are the easy explanation
as to why so many of Tuesday night's South
American-style numbers failed to make the
connection. It's like watching Miami Sound Machine
fronted by Michael Ignatieff, but sometimes - when
Byrne keeps his songs deceptively simple, like
they used to be, rather than deceptively complicated
- it really works. The lines "Come on down, you old
fart, let's see if you've got a heart" stand out
beautifully from "Something Ain't Right", and the
familiar nervy guitar riff from "Life During
Wartime" is reborn a sensuous Latin horn line to
devastating effect. Best of all is a blazing
Merengue-metal version of "Burning Down the House",
which out-scalds even the industrial- strength
nostalgia of the solo "Psycho Killer" and the very
plaintive "Heaven" which close the show.


NB
- Brixton Academy is a popular music venue in London.
- Come Dancing is a British TV competition for ballroom
dancers.
- Michael Ignatieff is an American who writes
intellectual columns for high-brow British newspapers.


contributed by Chris Ridd