The Guardian (9 May 1997) by Dan Glaister

Remote Control

The original replicant, David Byrne, is in London with a short spiky haircut and an eclectic new album. He tells Dan Glaister about the extent of his new Feelings.
Photograph by Eamonn McCabe.

There is a replicant in the offices of Warner Brothers. Sure, he looks normal enough. His clothes are normal everyday workwear, his skin is a regular healthy tan,
his hair is short and spiky, just like we like it, and his face bears a normal, low-blink-rate expression.

None of the people in the office can see him. He walks
among them, treading lightly on the corporate carpet,
leaning over to peer at some humanoid work activity,
turning a quizzical eye to a wall decoration, without
leaving a trace. They glance up as he walks past, but
nobody looks directly at him. Around him flows the
quiet hum of a contented workforce. Somewhere from
the walls comes a different noise. A high-pitched,
slightly strangled male voice mournfully sings "I love
America", while a trumpet pops out a refrain that has
more to do with Latin America than America the Brave.
The voice belongs to the replicant.

Now the replicant, a life-size model of a man, is
slumped on the sofa next to me. We shall call him
David Byrne. His body lies horizontal, his neck is
jerked back at a right angle. He is speaking to me
in disconnected staccato phrases, lacking fluency
and grammar.

This David Byrne landed in London the previous night.
He has brought a new album with him. It is called
Feelings. This is a joke. The cover features a doll
of David Byrne, staring ahead with great concentration.
The doll is identical to the David Byrne next to me
except for the neat seam across the base of his neck.

"The title's based on the doll," David Byrne tells
me. "I thought I'd have a cover of myself as a Ken
doll. This little male doll, blank expression on it,
and we'd photograph it as if it were a Calvin Klein
ad."

This David Byrne does not really talk like that.
This is how he speaks: "One of those ... ads ...
where it's ... just some ... kind of slightly geeky
... looking ... kid ... dressed in ... wrinkled ...
jeans." He talks like a David Byrne song. His voice
is soft, high-pitched, thin.

The doll on the cover is remote, devoid of emotion.
"I thought the best title would be something like
Passion, or Ecstasy, to play off that kind of thing.
Feelings was the one ... that made me chuckle ...
most. Somebody said: 'But David, people are going
to think that you're doing that song.'"

David Byrne laughs. "He-he."

David Byrne tells me more things about dolls. "My
favourite recently was the Jeff Goldblum doll from
Independence Day which looked nothing like him.
For the album we made four dolls. There's a blank,
empty expression on the cover, but inside there's
the doll weeping, pissed-off, whatever, an
emotional doll. Although, since it was only made
for a record company, it ends at the waist."

It is a real doll. "Tried doing it with computer,"
says David Byrne. "My skin plasticised, but it
ended up looking too much like an updated version
of a Kraftwerk cover. Too cyber-techno. I wanted
it to look like a real thing."

The frail, slightly stooped David Byrne figure
sitting next to me brings to mind David Bowie in
The Man Who Fell To Earth. He has the same tip-
toeing fragility. The same dislocated humour, the
same innocent gaze. Just when you think you may
have lost him, he leaps back into real time with
the answer to a question, perhaps your question.

He is a convincing replicant. It's just that some
of the details are a little blurry. Take the
clothes. A convincing copy of trash American
janitor gear, the creases on his trousers are
a little too sharp. The creases running
horizontally across the knees are plain wrong.
Nobody irons horizontal creases. And the colour.
This man isn't just wearing a little powder blue,
he is covered in the stuff. Powder-blue trousers,
powder-blue shirt, powder-blue jacket. It is a
shock to register the absurd almost lime green
of his desert boots.

The clothing and the edginess of his movements
bring to mind Devo, with whom he has worked for
his new album. They worked on a track called
Wicked Little Doll. "I see the doll as being
just like me," says David Byrne. "I love the
doll. We're the same."

I study this David Byrne very closely. I sit
next to him, but often he doesn't see me. I
study his profile as he jerks his head around
looking at things in the room. I wonder about
his age. I know he is almost 45, but the detail
is wrong. He is too young. There is some
tightness around the mouth, something about the
sheen on the skin that makes me think of Cliff
Richard. The hairs on the back of his neck are
grey, a nice contrast with the brown hair on
his head. Through the gaps between the buttons
on his powder blue shirt, I see curls of grey
chest hair.

This David Byrne is young and old at the same
time. He sounds as he did 20 years ago. He
looks younger than he did two years ago, when
a dishevelled David Byrne turned up with long
heir. He looks younger that he did 10 years
ago. His music is young and old. This David
Byrne album is full of bright, sparky pop
nuggets, dark mutterings and rumblings running
beneath them.

"I didn't know how it was going to turn out.
I was kinda surprised it came out as poppy as
it did. When I started writing some of the
stuff it was sounding very dark. Trip folk.
But really dark. A few of them are still there.
But some of the others got lighter and lighter."

The result is eclectic and diverse, a magpie
album, filching and pilfering, offering pop
morsels. "If I'm making that sort of record
I really do feel like I have a pop sensibility.
Three- or four-minute songs, cut out any bars of
music where it might get boring." It does not
get boring. I have tried playing it two, three
times in rotation and I do not get bored.

I tell him it is a fine album. "Well, can't ask
for better than that," he tells me. I tell him
it is a fun album. "I guess I was finally kinda
relaxed making a record," he tells me. "Part of
it was that I wasn't going in to a studio with
the mindset that this is it, you've got two weeks,
three weeks, whatever to record an album, this
is the budget, that's it. I decided to take it
one track at a time, call people up, always with
the idea that if we don't like it we won't finish
it."

People he called up were Morcheeba in Clapham,
Devo on Sunset Strip, some DJ people in New
York, Joe Galdo in Miami and The Black Cat
Orchestra in Seattle. "There's a real kind of
sponge effect," says David Byrne. "Taking off
just a little bit of this, a little bit of
that ... the cafeteria ... going down the
line, take some of this, have some of that."
He likes labels in his cafeteria. He likes to
put a name to what he is tasting. Trip folk is
his favourite name today. It sounds promising.

Some things don't have proper labels yet. He
tells me about a Brazilian recording with
Japanese squiggly bits on it. There is no
term for this. He tells me about some other
things he has heard about. "There's a Puerto
Rican band out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida --
Fort Lauderdale, known as a kind of spring
break where all the college guys go and get
drunk -- which combines metal and salsa.
They've got all the long hair and stuff, but
there's a conga player and a timbale player.
Playing salsa rhythms but with the ferocity
and attitude of a metal band. It's just
amazing." David Byrne giggles. This is funny.
I giggle with him.

He giggles some more while he tells me about
his video for Miss America, the single from
the album. The video shows some of what is
inside this David Byrne's head. "The director
is one of the co-owners of this restaurant
on the Lower East Side called Lucky Chans
where all the waitresses are Asian
transvestites. People would say, 'David,
David I know this woman with huge tits
called Bob. Bob does aerobics. Do you
think you'd like that?'" We laugh some more.

"Didn't David Byrne use to be labelled an
intellectual?" I ask, thinking to catch out the
replicant. "I'm aware of that," says David Byrne.
"It kind of ruffles my feathers. It's kind of odd.
It was an insult. It's please, no, call me stupid,
anything but that. It's a funny thing because when
the label was first being applied to me in the
late seventies, I thought you could just as well
apply it to, say, The Sex Pistols, because it
was so intellectually sharp and calculated in
every aspect, whether it was the clothes, the
graphics, the songs. Everything was so perfectly
calculated and worked out. I thought, they're much
smarter than we are, because of that kind of
attitude no one would ever dare call them
intellectual. Maybe clever."

This stupid non-intellectual tells me about the
book he has just finished. It is called Biographi,
about the man who was Enver Hoxha's double in
Albania. He was a very accurate double, thanks
to plastic surgery. He ran into some problems
after the death of the guiding light of the
Albanian people. This David Byrne finds to story
of the double very touching. I say it might explain
all the sightings of Elvis. We laugh at this. "I'm
going to wander off now," says David Byrne, and he
picks his way through the office. Nobody seems to
see him.