David Byrne and St Vincent will perform at next month's Sydney Festival. Source: Supplied
DAVID Byrne is keen to give Melbourne's bike share scheme a spin when he visits for a handful of shows in January, but he's not so certain about heading out on two wheels in Sydney.
The former Talking Heads singer and songwriter, an avid cyclist in his New York home town who once wrote a bike-based travelogue, Bicycle Diaries, says he has followed debate over the Melbourne program. Many supporters believe it would be better patronised if mandatory helmet laws were relaxed, allowing more flexible use.
"I've noticed that some people say it's been a success, and some people say it's been a failure," the dapper 60-year-old offers diplomatically. "Well, I'm looking forward to trying it out."
Sydney, on the other hand - where he has previously cycled, "in Manly, and from downtown out to Bondi, and stuff like that" - doesn't offer quite as much certainty for a gentleman cyclist. "There's a couple of routes I've taken in the past and I've thought, 'oh, if only there was a bike lane here, I wouldn't be so worried'," he says.
Byrne, whose angular dancing style and cerebral take on soul music shot him to prominence in the mid-1970s, will perform at the Sydney Festival with fellow New Yorker Annie Clark, both pictured, his collaborator on a rich new album of brass-based songs, Love This Giant.
Exactly half Byrne's age, Clark - who performs as St Vincent and has been a member both of the Polyphonic Spree and of Sufjan Stevens' touring band, which featured at the 2008 Sydney Festival - says she grew up listening to Talking Heads records. The pair came together in 2009, although Byrne had already been a fan of the indie performer's solo act since catching her in New York at least a year earlier. Love This Giant turned into a three-year collaboration, with alternative rock producer John Congleton providing percussion tracks and a full brass ensemble, with Latin and funk-driven grooves, taking the place of a regular guitar group.
They'll be performing songs from the album in Sydney, as well as at Melbourne and Hobart shows, but they'll also have "a pretty hefty chunk of more familiar material" - meaning, of course, brassed-up versions of classic Talking Heads tunes and of songs from St Vincent's three albums (Marry Me, Actor and Strange Mercy).
"The staging is fairly unusual for a pop concert, though it's completely entertaining, of course," Byrne says. "The brass is moving around and we reconfigure ourselves for everything, and sometimes the movement continues during things."
If that sounds more than a little bit reminiscent of Talking Heads' glory days, such as the band's big-suited Stop Making Sense stage show and movie from 1984, Byrne says it's deliberate. "I know I chose (older songs) where I thought, 'oh, this will work', like it was almost meant to be arranged for this group of instruments," he says, with a nod to a video clip on YouTube of the brass lineup performing his old band's hit Burning Down the House in Minneapolis in September.
Byrne has long had an interest in dance and movement, with a section in his recent book How Music Works devoted to the notion of "swarm" behaviour onstage. The 12-piece ensemble choreographed parts of its performance based on a theory that, he points out, is related to natural phenomena such as "the formation flying of starlings".
This involved each performer aligning themselves with another, staying briefly in that position - while performing - and then moving into alignment with another member of the ensemble. "What was amazing was that twice in the course of the song, we all found ourselves in a perfect line, side-by-side, all facing downstage - order emerged out of seeming chaos," he wrote in rehearsal notes published on his blog.
Other songs in the show involve variations on complex stage movements, again a hallmark of the intricately designed performances Byrne has often favoured.
"You'll appreciate what some of the poor brass players have to go through, when they're moving around and all the various positions they have to get in," he laughs. "There's one song where they play it lying down, and there's a couple of brass players who said, 'I don't know about that'."
He says he has avoided reading reviews of the tour's US leg, "not because I'm afraid of what they'll say, just that I realised that I wanted to have the pure experience of us performing, and the audience". However he recalls how, over lunch recently, a friend described the show to others at the table as "oh, it's like performance art". Byrne chuckles at the memory and says: "I thought, well, depending on who you say that to, it could be a good thing or a bad thing."
Though musical collaborations have tended to define Byrne's career, he has always forged an individual artistic path, something he acknowledges was partly due to childhood insecurity. He touches on the matter in How Music Works, a very readable combination of memoir and musings on the nature of music and performance.
"I suppose we build a narrative out of our own experience - and my narrative is that I had trouble fitting in, and therefore I used music as a way to communicate," he says. "Being socially uncomfortable and somewhat inept might've been a hindrance in many ways, but in other ways I can look back and go, 'oh well, that's what made me get into music'.
"In retrospect maybe it was a good thing - but I don't know if that's true for everyone. I mean, when I tell that story, it makes it sound as if every kid who doesn't feel like an outsider, or who is a popular kid, has no chance of doing anything creative because they're too comfortable in their skin, and I don't think that's necessarily true.
"But it certainly has been for me, and for a lot of other people I know as well."
Also an accomplished visual artist, Byrne says he has little trouble switching between creative forms, depending on what's required.
"I'm like a lot of people, in that if I'm on a good roll, I'll keep going," he says. "But sometimes when you get something down, and you go, 'I can push further to try and complete this right now, but I don't really have any more ideas of where it should go', (it's) better to set it aside, do something else and then come back to it with fresh ears, or fresh eyes, or whatever. And then you go, 'oh, now I can hear what parts work and what parts don't work'."
Which was exactly how the three-year creative process with Clark and Congleton for Love This Giant developed, as Byrne explains. Musical snippets were emailed back and forth between the trio, to slowly build up a complete work.
"The borders between who did what parts of the writing were much more porous than in some of the other projects I've been involved in," he says. "So sometimes Annie would send me a bit of a musical idea, and I would extend it and elaborate on it, maybe put a little bit of a melodic snippet on top of it and send it back to her for either approval or comment or whatever; and sometimes she would just say, 'that's great', and sometimes she would get inspired and add on to it further. So after a few back-and-forths like that, you'd end up with something and go, 'oh! It's taken a form'."
Asked to nominate favourites from the album, Byrne pauses and offers, almost non-committally: "There's ones where I wrote the words, where I'm very happy with the words. I can say that, I guess."
It's an unnecessarily false modesty; the set rises and falls through a well-measured structure, with standout songs from its dozen offerings including I Should Watch TV, Outside of Time and Space and the Walt Whitman-referencing The Forest Awakes.
As it turns out, Byrne will be doing a bit of forest awakening of his own outside of the Australian shows, with a few days of hiking in Tasmania ("it looks amazing"). And just maybe, he admits, there'll be a cycle over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, well away from the city's traffic. "I may just have to see if I can get a loaner bike," he says.
David Byrne and St Vincent, Hamer Hall, Melbourne, January 14 and 15, State Theatre, Sydney, January 17 and 18, Mona Foma, Hobart, January 20
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