EP.255 - DAVID BYRNE

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing podcasts?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I'm delighted to be with you.

Thank you so much for joining me out here in the Norfolk countryside, East Anglia, UK, towards the end

of August 2025.

I'm here with my best dog friend, Rosie.

She's a whippet poodle cross and right now, possibly a little bit more cross than whippet and poodle.

Because it's been a a hot day out here, and I'm pretty sure she would rather be in the shady spot in the kitchen from which I extracted her a few minutes ago.

Is that correct, Rosie?

That's a stupid question I'm not answering.

I'm sorry, but look, it's a beautiful evening.

It's lovely and breezy, and once we get out there to the top field in the evening sun, you will be so happy that I dragged you along on this walk.

I certainly hope treats will be forthcoming upon my return.

Of course, doglegs.

Anyway, how are you doing, podcasts?

I hope you're doing well out there and your summer has been behaving itself.

Now look, let's get down to business.

My guest this week is American musician, author and director David Byrne.

Ooh, someone whose music has been a cherished part of my life since I was 15.

And that was when I walked into the study of a friend of mine at school and he was playing the name of this band is Talking Heads, a live album.

I think it was the song Don't Worry About the Government that grabbed me first.

I borrowed the album, made myself a cassette copy, and set off on my Talking Heads and David Byrne adventure.

Within a few months, David Byrne was in my art rock pantheon alongside David Bowie and Brian Eno.

And you know what?

He resides there still.

So what I'm saying is that for me this podcast was a big deal.

However, if you're not up for the deep introduction dive, just skip ahead 15 minutes from this point and you'll find me and David Byrne waffling in London back in June this year.

For the remainers, Here's some selected Byrne facts and personal highlights for you.

Burn facts, David Byrne was born not in America, but in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1952.

But he was still a toddler when he and his family moved to the Canadian port city of Hamilton, Ontario, where they lived for a few years before settling on the east coast of the USA in Maryland.

There, in his late teens, David briefly attended the Maryland Institute College of Art.

After having dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design, that was where David had met drummer Chris France and his girlfriend, later wife and bass player, Tina Weymouth, with whom David would come to form Talking Heads once they'd all moved to New York in 1974.

In June 1975, the three-piece version of Talking Heads played their first show at the CBGB music venue, then just a couple of years old, opening for venue regulars the Ramones, who, along with acts like Blondie, Patty Smith, and television, were were helping to make CBGBs the focus of New York's emerging punk and new wave scene.

The songs Talking Heads played were sparse and choppy and David Burns' stage presence along with his lyrics and vocals were angular, odd and intriguing.

The band didn't look like rock stars, but dressed in preppy clothes and in a strained, high-pitched voice, Burns sang lyrics like, Girls are getting into abstract analysis.

They want to make an intuitive leap.

They're making plans that have far-reaching effects.

And the girls want to be with the girls.

And the boys say, What do you mean?

There were no other bands singing songs like that at the time.

Another song that became an early Talking Heads anthem was written from the point of view of a murderous psychopath who was brushing up on his French.

That's a bit of Psycho Killer recorded live at CBGB's in 1975.

Keyboard player and guitarist Jerry Harrison joined the band in 1977, the same year they released their debut album called Talking Heads 77.

And one of the people who was impressed by it was ex-Roxy Music noisemaker and producer Brian Eno.

He produced the next three Talking Heads albums, 1978's 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food.

79's Fear of Music, which some people consider to be the best Talking Heads album, and 1980's Remain in Light, which some other people consider to be the best Talking Heads album.

Me?

Oh, I like them all.

shadows

Take a walk through the peaceful meadows

You may find yourself in a beautiful house

with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself well

How did I get here?

Letting the tears go by

That was a few moments from The Good Thing from more songs about buildings and food memories can't wait from fear of music and once in a lifetime from remain in light.

It was Brian Eno who introduced Talking Heads to the music of Nigerian artist Fella Kuti, sometimes called the father of the Afrobeat genre.

That's what I always call him.

The influence of Feller's polyrhythmic blend of African music, odd pop, funk, and jazz can be heard on Fear of Music, very much on Remain in Light, and also on Eno and Burns' album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the pair started working on after Talking Heads had finished touring Fear of Music at the end of the 70s.

When I bought Bush of Ghosts in 1986, five years after it was released, I loved the weird mix of grooves and what I thought of as ominous ethnic robot music, overlaid with sampled recordings of people chanting, delivering monologues, ranting on radio phone-ins, or just singing in other languages.

That's a bit of the carrier from Bush of Ghosts, which features the voice of Lebanese singer Dunya Yunes.

And there's a link in the description to a Guardian article from 2022 around the time of the reissue of Bush of Ghosts, in which Bern Eno and Dunya Yunes talk a little bit about some of the charges of cultural appropriation that have swirled around the record over the years.

That's a whole concept that didn't even occur to 16-year-old me when I was first listening to Bush of Ghosts.

I just liked the voices, which, given my musical diet back then, I was unlikely to hear anywhere else.

Soon after buying My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, I bought the Catherine Wheel, an album of music composed by David Byrne for a 1981 theatre project by American dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, some of which sounded to me like a companion piece to Bush of Ghosts.

That's the Red House from David Burns' 1981 album, The Catherine Wheel.

In 1983, Talking Heads released Speaking in Tongues, which featured what would be their biggest commercial success up to that point, Burning Down the House, and one of my favorite ever songs by any band, This Must Be the Place, naive melody.

Literally just saying the name of it makes me feel emotional, because I'm mad, I think.

Accompanied by a lovely video directed by David Byrne, which featured David, Tina, Chris, and Jerry watching home movies along with members of the expanded touring lineup, recruited to do justice to the more musically ambitious and complicated music Talking Heads had been making.

Director Jonathan Demi, later best known for his film Silence of the Lambs, filmed four of Talking Head's LA shows in December 1983 and released them the following year as the concert film Stop Making Sense, an enduringly wonderful record of a group of musicians at the top of their game.

Talking Head's last three albums sounded very different to those that had preceded them.

1985's Little Creatures, which included the hits And She Was and Road to Nowhere, was less funky and drew instead from Americana and country music, as well as the Louisiana sounds of Cajun and Zydeco.

That was the soundtrack to my O-levels that summer.

So, bummer at first, but then later that summer, party time.

David Byrne delved deeper into the idiosyncrasies of small-town American life and culture when, in 1986, he wrote and directed his feature film True Stories, which was released soon after an album of the same name by Talking Heads.

That album, True Stories, at least the one by Talking Heads, there is another

album which contains music from the film and lots of really nice bits of incidental music, but the Talking Heads album contains a track called Radio Head, which according to the actor Stephen Tobolovsky, aka Ned Ryerson, BING, in Groundhog Day, was written after a conversation he once had with David Byrne in which he claimed to be able to see and hear distinct musical tones that people apparently emit.

Some form of synesthesia, don't I imagine?

Anyway, the resulting song may not be a Talking Heads classic, but Radio Head made enough of an impression on a young Tom York for him to name his band after it.

The last Talking Heads album, Naked, was released in 1988 and featured a mix of summery Afro beat and Latin sounds on tracks like Nothing But Flowers and Totally Nude, alongside darker, more political material.

And at the time, it sounded to me less like a Talking Heads record and more like a step towards David Byrne exploring different directions on his own, which is what it turned out to be.

After the rather messy, perfunctory dissolution of Talking Heads, Byrne wasted no time recording a solo album and setting up a label, Luaca Bop, through which he released compilations of some of his favorite Brazilian music from the Tropicalia movement of the late 60s and 70s, which blended traditional Brazilian sounds with more avant-garde pop and psychedelic styles.

Byrne's first solo album, post-Talking Heads, was Rei Momo, released in 1989, and it incorporated some of those sounds, but with songs sung mainly in English and with a band made up of top Latin American players and backing vocalists.

I love that album.

You know, I love the cerebral art rock

that David Byrne did so well with Talking Heads, but the songs on Ray Momo

are often very straightforwardly emotional.

I put it on the night before I met David Byrne for this podcast, having not heard it for a while, and I was instantly

joyfully shredded.

The songs are so beautiful, but they also remind me of falling in love at the end of my teens and of my mum who also loved that album.

So, anyway, it didn't take long before I was sat there with tears streaming down my face as Ray Momo played Carnival Eyes.

questions through the stars.

Is there any wonder

Carnival girl?

Where do those eyes come from?

What is inside them?

Self-that's Carnival Eyes from Ray Momo.

Five more David Burns solo albums followed between 1992 and 2004, filled with many more magical meetings of catchy pop and avant-garde strangeness.

And in 2008, David reunited with Brian Eno for the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Another particularly successful collaboration came about in 2012 for the album Love This Giant with American musician Annie Clark, aka Saint Vincent.

That was Who from Love This Giant by David Byrne and St.

Vincent.

All along, David has continued to make music for films, TV, and stage shows.

He won an Oscar in 1987 for the score he wrote with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kong Tzu for The Last Emperor.

He collaborated with Fat Boy Slim in 2005 on the Imelda Marcos musical Here Lies Love and in 2007 contributed a soundtrack to the TV show Big Love in which Bill Paxton starred as the polygamous patriarch of a fundamentalist Mormon family in contemporary Utah.

Byrne also composed music for two productions by experimental theatre maestro Robert Wilson, The Knee Plays in 1985 and The Forest in 1991.

As far as the music went, they were a little too experimental for my taste.

I never really got to grips with The Forest, but I did develop a massive crush on Burns' Music for the Knee Plays, which is still one of my favorite albums to listen to if I'm doing manual labor or working on a new installation that explores the tension between collective memory and farts.

In the future, it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.

In the future, men will be super masculine and women will be ultra-feminine.

In the future, half of us will be mentally ill.

That was in the future from David Burns' music for the Knee Plays.

Before this year, 2025, David Burns' last solo album was 2018's American Utopia, for which he went on tour playing elaborate shows that included a stage full of musicians who performed choreographed routines to solo material and talking heads classics on wirelessly amplified instruments.

The American Utopia concert film, directed by Spike Lee, no less, was released at the end of 2020, and watching it at the end of that year was another emotional moment, especially as everything about the film, from the staging, the costumes, and the way the songs were played, worked so well.

And I haven't even mentioned the books and the art projects and the bicycle racks he designed.

But we've got to get to the conversation.

I nearly got to record a podcast with David around the time of American Utopia, but it fell through.

So I was very happy when the opportunity came around again thanks to the release of David's new album, Who Is the Sky?

out on the 5th of September on Matador.

Song titles include I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party, My Apartment is My Friend, and the first single from the album, Everybody Laughs.

Everybody's gotten everything again.

Everybody's outside now, they're

I met David on a hot day in London back in early June this year, and there were so many nerdy music questions I wanted to ask him about talking heads and the music he's made over the years, but instead we had a more free-flowing conversation that did touch on some of those nerdy areas, but was more about making music in general.

I also asked asked David about the iconic video for Once in a Lifetime, the 64th video ever played on MTV when it launched in 1981.

First video they played was Anybody, Anybody, Beulah,

Video Killed the Radio Star by Trevor Horn's band Buggles.

David made the Once in a Lifetime video with choreographer and oh Mickey star Tony Basil, who I asked David about, as well as mentioning Californian multimedia maverick and music video pioneer Bruce Connor.

He made a couple of videos for tracks from Bush of Ghosts, which in the same spirit as the album used found footage from science and educational films, as well as documentaries and TV ads, to create visuals as stark, hypnotic, and unsettling as the music.

There's links to one of those Bruce Connor videos, as well as many other things we mentioned and loads of my favorite Talking Heads videos in the description of today's podcast.

Okay, we've made it through the intro.

Well done, team.

I'll be back at the end for some live show news, but right now, with David Byrne, here we go.

Have you done Louis Theroux podcast yet?

That's coming up, I think, tomorrow or the next day.

Right, so I've stolen a march on Louis.

That's good.

Yes, okay.

He is an old school friend of mine, and he made his name in documentary filmmaking, but now he has latterly branched out into podcasting, which is my turf.

So he is encroaching on my turf.

Is he still doing documentaries?

He is, yeah.

Oh, but now he's trying to do both.

He's trying to do both, which I feel threatened by.

Uh-huh.

But.

Yeah, no, he's.

We can talk about that.

He's brilliant.

What, with him?

No, with you.

Okay, good.

can be your psychiatrist.

Well, basically, yes.

If there's any way that you can just give everything you've got to me.

Yes, I won't tell him anything.

And then when you see him,

just be as cold as you possibly can be.

Okay.

And just give him absolutely nothing like monosyllabic answers.

Yes.

Like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That would be great.

Thank you.

Do you enjoy the process of doing press for your records?

Up to a point.

if it got to be weeks of doing nothing but press, I would probably start to repeat myself and I would start to bore myself.

But at this point, when I'm just starting and just doing it, beginning it, beginning, doing some promo, it's actually kind of good.

It means I have to, as best I can,

and it's really difficult,

try and verbalize what it is I'm doing,

if I'm talking about a new record, which I am, talk about what it is, that kind of thing.

I don't verbalize or come up with a good, oh, here's the pitch concept for this.

I kind of don't do that.

So this forces me to kind of think about, self-reflect, and think about what it is that you've been doing.

What does it mean?

And is that an enjoyable process or something that feels uncomfortable and strange and forced?

It's a little strange, but I think in the end it's pretty good.

It's good for me.

I think it helps me realize, oh, this is what I'm doing.

Therefore,

if you're

talking to myself,

if I'm doing

a performance, I should keep that in mind so that it fits with the other.

Now that I know what I'm doing.

It should fit with the other things I'm doing.

When did you finish this record?

I think it was kind of finished in

January or February.

Oh, okay.

Not that long ago.

Not that long ago.

And have you.

It seems like a long time to me, but not that long ago.

Yeah.

Have you discovered new things about it since finishing it?

Do you feel differently about it now than you did when you were making it?

I'm learning things from people's reactions to it.

What are they saying?

What are the typical responses you're getting?

They're saying this record sounds very cheerful and hopeful and uplifting.

And I'm thinking to myself, I'm glad

that makes me very happy.

I'm glad to hear that.

But I didn't go into it thinking I'm going to make something to make people

make people happy.

I mean that

sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Everybody laughs.

Just came out as we're speaking about five hours ago.

The video dropped on YouTube and I read read the first few comments.

And yeah, it's people very happy to see you back, so much love for you, and so excited to see,

you know, pleased that you're in an up-tempo mode.

I suppose they feel like they've got quite a lot of grim

reality and also fairly hardcore, grim culture to go around it.

That's already freely available.

As do I, but I also feel like one way to combat that is to make a counterforce.

So, in a way, I think to myself, oh,

that's what you're doing.

That's part of what you're doing, anyway.

When you're writing those songs, though, are you able to disconnect yourself sufficiently from what's going on in the world or on the news, for example?

Like, because I suppose the problem sometimes is that you see what's happening and it makes you.

Well, I know that when I do silly things, sometimes, I'm not suggesting your songwriting is silly, but I do silly things.

And when I'm making something stupid or funny or whatever it might be, it's not very easy if I've just been watching the news because the juxtaposition is so stark.

It makes me think, what am I doing?

Is this going to help?

Should I be doing this?

Do you ever get that?

Yes, of course.

Yes, of course I do.

I mean, I

think that and other things like,

oh, what are you doing making just a record with songs?

Look at how horrible things are.

You should be kind of putting all your effort into dealing with all these things that are happening in the world.

And then I realized, no,

this is what I do well.

And this is my way of kind of

being a counter force to many of the things that are happening.

But yes, it's kind of paralyzing to read a lot of the news every day.

Do you have periods where you cut yourself off?

Not so much.

I'm kind of a bit of a news junkie, but I do, I read in the morning and then not much after that.

And

some years ago I started a kind of web magazine or newspaper called Reasons to Be Cheerful that's again

It's not just cheery stuff, but it's kind of news stories about people who have

found a solution to something or have done something that is hopeful in the world, some project that they're doing or something like that.

So that helps because I'm almost on the lookout for those kinds of things.

A weekly dose of dopamine in your inbox is what reasons to be cheerful builds itself as.

Yes, yes, that's one of our descriptions.

I've learned more recently

that

when

someone whose name shall remain nameless nameless appears in one of the news headlines that I'm reading in the morning, I'll just skim right by it.

I know what this guy's going to do.

I know what kind of person he is.

I don't need to kind of go down a rabbit hole and wallow in it.

I'll just keep flipping.

Yeah.

I really appreciated finding reasons to be cheerful when it launched.

I can't remember how I came across it, but I read about it and I thought, I'm glad someone's doing that.

Thank you.

Did you have conversations with friends of yours?

Were there any friends of yours who said David this is a little pollyanna-ish isn't it?

We're looking at real problems and you're just trying to distract people with this stuff.

I was on the lookout for that kind of thing myself but so far no.

So far I think we've been fairly diligent.

These are proven solutions.

that can be copied or whatever.

It's not just a feel-good feel-good thing.

It's somebody who's actually done something or a group of people who've actually done something.

And

they're not things that are like one of.

Like if a philanthropist gave a lot of money to a hospital, as happens, we wouldn't write about that.

That's not a sustainable solution.

That's kind of a one-time thing.

Yeah.

So for example, this week I was looking at a few stories on the website.

One about older adults conquering loneliness through storytelling.

Storytelling clubs essentially organized for older people out in the States, many of them homebound or isolated.

And so they can meet either in real life or online, and they share stories.

And it's kind of like communal podcasting almost.

It does sound like that.

I haven't tuned into it, but it's kind of tempting to go.

Yeah.

I want to hear what some of these stories are.

Very much.

During the pandemic, there was the option to join an app called Good Sam, Good Samaritan, and you could do things in the community.

I ended up doing very little.

All I did was go and be a steward at the vaccination center for a few days.

But one thing that I really wanted to do, and which maybe I will do at some point, is call people up, phone people up, and just talk to them if they're at home and they're on their own, especially if they're older.

I think that would be a great thing to do.

That reminded me of this story and reasons to be cheerful.

You never know what they might have to say.

Yeah.

And then there's another story about

how shared electric cargo bikes are changing cities.

There's quite a few stories on Reasons to be Cheerful about the ways that towns are trying to adapt and plan themselves differently in order to be more sustainable in all sorts of ways.

A lot of bike-related stories.

You're a big bicyclist, right?

I am.

That's my principal way of getting around in New York City.

It's It's a lot easier than it used to be in the city.

There's more bike lanes.

Now they're making those bike lanes a little more protected, like putting a buffer or little

things between the traffic and the bike lane, because sometimes traffic would just veer in or use it as a parking spot.

If people have trepidations about riding in London or New York or someplace like that, I would say then don't do it.

Only do it if you feel kind of safe about about it and in control, because there's a lot going on

coming at you from every angle.

Have you ridden in London?

Oh yeah, yeah, many times.

Right.

Do you have a Brompton?

No, I have a different folding one.

It's called a turn,

but doesn't get quite as small as a Brompton.

Have you tried a Brompton?

I don't know if I have.

You're not sponsored by them.

I'm just...

You've got one in the back there.

I saw that.

They're pretty good.

I have a friend who has one, really likes it.

I mean, she can just bring it onto her apartment, take it to the office, bring it in, put it in a closet, whatever.

The one I have is a little bit bigger than that, but it's small enough that I can fit it in the luggage bay of a tour bus.

Perfect.

And how's the bike rage situation in New York?

I've noticed, this might be just me because I might be a terrible cyclist, but I feel like over the last year or so, the influx of e-bikes and delivery riders on souped-up bikes zipping through all the red lights and everything it's a little bit wild westy at the moment in it it is a little bit wild westy at the moment has been for now a couple of years at least the delivery guys are kind of going against the traffic really fast zipping through the red lights as do some of the non-delivery guys absolutely that's just

all that do you tut and shake your head yes yeah i do i i don't know really what to do about it.

I mean, occasionally I'll shout out, wrong way.

Yeah.

You're going the wrong way.

But most of the time, I just feel like, no, I'm not going to be scolding everyone.

But yeah, I feel like that.

At some point,

I'm hoping that these riders will realize, oh, it's going to be safer if we all go in the same direction and if we stop for pedestrians and traffic at rest.

I guess it's more about

enforcement, isn't it?

It's more of.

Some of it's by enforcement.

Now, New York has just done this sort of crackdown

on cyclists doing any of those things, but they're being really severe about it.

They're giving them a kind of summons that if they don't respond, they get arrested.

Oh.

That's a bit much.

Maybe just a a little fine wouldn't be enough.

Yeah.

If you have gotten those in the past, if you were going the wrong way or running a red light, it just seems like a little bit too much.

This time next year, they'll be shot in the knees.

Something like that, yeah.

By Trump's

bike police.

You know, he drives to work on his bicycle.

In all fairness, with his husband on the back, which is a nice, loving relationship.

But

this guy didn't have a clue.

Didn't have a clue.

He didn't have, he didn't know what he was doing.

You know, he drives to work on his bicycle.

Have you done any interviews on on this round of press where you're sat in the room and the

host starts by introducing you and reading out a very long list of incredibly effervescent credits and just singing your praises in front of you?

Do you know what I mean?

No, that has not happened this trip so far.

Okay.

Are you going to do that now?

No, I'm not going to do that.

I don't like hearing it.

If I hear that the person they're saying that about is in the room, it always makes me cringe for the person.

Mm-hmm.

Because Because it must be weird.

Is it weird?

It's really weird.

It's really weird just to be

introduced anytime with some kind of superlative.

Yeah.

Because I feel like, well, I'm bound to be disappointing after all that.

I think they must assume that you would like it.

Like, they sort of think, well, look at all you've achieved.

I'm going to tell you all the things you've achieved.

Well done.

It's very nice.

Yeah, it's very nice.

It's very flattering.

But yeah, I've got to prove myself now.

Yeah, yeah.

No, you don't.

You don't have to prove yourself.

This is a relaxed conversation between two folks who've just met.

And it can go any way.

It doesn't need to.

You don't need to do anything.

You can just...

You can get annoyed and

go quiet if you want.

I'm hoping you don't.

I really enjoyed the album.

Congratulations on it.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for listening.

Who is the sky?

That's the name of it.

Where does that come from?

It's a text that I got.

Someone doing the whatever, speech-to-text transfer

thing into their phone and saying, who is this guy?

And it came up in my phone, who is the sky?

Jimi Hendrix style.

Yes, and I thought, oh, I like that.

I'll use that as an album title.

I also enjoyed...

Do you feel like you have a sort of lyrical style that you stick to for an album?

Like, it felt like you were doing a certain kind of lyrics sometimes here.

Oh, I'm not aware of that.

Okay, that's good to hear.

Maybe

more sort of

it feels to me like you're in slightly more satirical mode or

definitely a lot of storytelling.

Yeah, okay.

Songs that have a beginning and a middle and an end that arrive somewhere different than when they began.

My apartment is my friend.

Did that strike you one day, that sentiment?

Did you suddenly start to personify your apartment and think of life from its point of view?

Yes, I mean, I've been in my apartment a lot during the pandemic.

Right.

And so I thought, ah,

I think I've written a pandemic song that expresses a little bit of what we went, some of us went through, who were just alone in our apartments.

And it was the apartment that was kind of holding us.

keeping us together, protecting us, all those sorts of things.

Have you always been someone who likes to have their living environment just so?

Or are you, can you sort of live with a certain amount of chaos?

I can live with a certain amount of chaos.

Yes.

My music room tends to get really chaotic, you know, piled with instruments and half-finished bits of music or lyrics or whatever just strewn everywhere.

But do you decorate?

Are you someone that likes to have nice pictures on the walls?

Oh, the walls of my apartment are filled with pictures, yes.

I'm a big fan of what's often called outsider art.

People who sometimes are maybe not trained as an artist, but are driven to paint or draw or do something like that.

And sometimes I strike a nerve.

They deal with something uncomfortable.

Where do you get hold of that stuff from?

Oh, there's some galleries that sell those kinds of things.

They keep an eye out for some of those kinds of things.

If something's sometimes...

Oh, you know,

my uncle just died, and I went into his garage and

he had hundreds and hundreds of paintings that he'd done and nobody knew about it.

That kind of thing.

There's also

an art fair in New York that specializes in that kind of thing.

Does that appreciation of outsider art extend to music?

I'm thinking about there was a book called Songs in the Key of X.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, I know that.

I know that project.

Or Win Chusid, I think, was.

Yeah, I'm familiar with some of those artists, some of those musicians.

Like Shuby Taylor was one I always really liked.

Do you know him?

No, I don't know that one.

He's a scat singer.

Wow.

Or at least he was.

He's no longer with us.

But African-American postman, maybe?

But he wanted to be a scat singer and would sing over cassettes of other people's music, sometimes quite unlikely choices of kind of country and western songs and things like that.

And he would scat, but his scat lexicon was very eccentric.

Have you never heard Shuby take?

No, I'm going to have to look him up.

Well, I can't resist playing you a tiny bit.

Okay.

Do you mind?

Oh, go ahead.

Because the first time I heard Shuby, speaking of

things that cheer you up,

This is not Shuby.

This is an advert for EasyJet.

I know this song too.

Oh yeah, what was that song?

So Italian guy, Andrea something or other,

he did a song singing in nonsense that was his version of what English sounded like.

Oh yes, I think I've heard that.

It's complete nonsense.

Well there's I've been an occasional word you recognize where he goes, all right.

But

most of it is complete gibberish, but it's gibberish of what English sounds like to an Italian.

That's right.

It's such a good idea, isn't it?

Like,

because

of our sort of Western Anglo-centric brains, I suppose, we're so used to doing imitations of how other languages work phonetically.

It's very strange to hear it the other way around, isn't it?

Yep.

What's his name again?

I think it's Andreas something or another.

I don't know his last name.

Okay.

So this is Shuby.

Let's learn to love and respect each other.

Shuby Taylor.

Shusu Suwa, Shri Da, Shrolla La We

Dusa.

Shrolla La Ho We Di Bo We Disaw the Roar Lauda Da Shri Lo Puka Lada Dashro We Disaw Lada Da Ro We Dada Sa People Sweden Shule

We Dawson Hall

He sticks to the melody, yeah, or his melody.

He's not just riffing, he's got a structure there.

Yeah, good.

Well, that's uh

I'm delighted that I've introduced you to Shuby Taylor.

I'm gonna listen listen to some more.

Have you ever

incorporated any of those kinds of approaches to music into things you've done consciously or or does that not work?

Sometimes if I've got some music but not a

no words yet written, I'll do a kind of scat vocal, figure out a melody.

or start scatting and discover a melody and then I'll record that.

Could just be a phone recording, but I'll record it.

And

then I'll try and find words that fit the kind of phonetic

scansion, is that what it is?

Something like that.

Yeah, I'll try and fit the phonetic stuff that I was doing.

Like, is this a hard syllable here?

Does it end with a consonant begin with this?

Is it an ooh or an a or vl or vlu or vlim?

Yeah, when I'm just not singing words, my assumption is I'm really kind of being attentive to where the melody wants to go and what kind of syllables might be more filled with more emotion.

So I'll try and find words that match that and then I'll keep doing that.

And sometimes that means that can be a long process of finding the words and then finding ones that actually make sense doing that.

Because I don't want them to be just complete nonsense.

So that can be a whole process, but it starts with that same not quite shoo-y-tailer, but a similar kind of thing.

Yeah.

So, for example, the lyrics on this new album, as you said, they're more storytelling-y.

They have a beginning, middle, and an end.

So, the

actual sound of the words is, I mean, it's still important, but perhaps it's less important than the story you're wanting to tell?

It depends.

Yes,

that might be true, although the ones where the words came first, I'll try and discover a melody that

emphasizes the word you want to emphasize.

Sometimes that means going up to a high note or a higher note for that word, and that will have the effect of emphasizing that word and making it more important in the storytelling.

But there are other ones that were done the other way, the way I described.

Just sounds first.

Yeah, like this one, Everybody Laughs, that was started off as just sounds.

And then I realized that, oh, I could do that.

Everybody, everybody, I could do that.

And if I repeated that, but just changed the things that everybody does or that happen to everybody, I can keep this repetitive thing going.

Got you.

I remember listening to an outtake with you and Eno panned left and right, and you're both taking a run at just improvising sounds over a backing track.

So you've got his go in one ear, and then you've got your go, presumably recorded totally separately, in the other ear.

Probably.

Dancing for money?

Oh, that could be.

Yeah, yeah, yes.

Never did get all the words to that one.

And you're both going totally different places and imagining a different thing to do rhythmically, but then you come together for the refrain, which is

dancing for money.

And you both suddenly come together.

It's quite good, though to have like two people with totally different ideas in left and right.

It was a very interesting insight.

Did you do a lot of that kind of thing in those days?

Yes, in those days.

And occasionally, if when appropriate,

I know that that's...

That's a technique that I can go to if needed.

Yeah, yeah.

So here's the inevitable AI question.

Are you using AI?

Are you exploring AI to make music at the moment?

No,

I haven't done that.

Would you be opposed to doing so on principle?

I would be opposed to using AI that had kind of scraped other people's songs in one way or another, and it was

meant to respond to a prompt like

write a David Burns song.

Oh, that's good.

I'll take it.

I mean, I think that's entirely possible that that could be done.

I've heard rumors,

believable rumors, that quite well-known artists have already done that.

Where they just say, do a song that sounds like me.

Yeah, do a song in the style of me, Jimmy Sparkles.

Yeah.

And

they will use that as the basis.

They won't just pass it off as their own.

They'll use it as the base and they'll build on it and they'll redo the vocal.

But they will use that as the structure for their song.

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

I mean, that's a sort of valid way to go, isn't it?

One would assume then that it's the algorithm is responding to what it has learned based on scraping that artist's own songs.

Yeah.

One would assume.

I mean, it's cannibalistic and weird.

Yeah, it is kind of cannibalistic and weird.

Auto-cannibalism.

But, I mean, when you're making a piece of art, does it matter how it's made?

I don't know.

That's a good question.

I guess what I'm maybe concerned is that you're kind of on some level, and I haven't really experimented with it, if the actual building blocks are taken from other people's records.

The actual sounds or phrases or melodies or whatever else are starting to be taken from other people's records, which seems entirely possible.

That seems like it's going into crossing some sort of line.

Is that not what you're doing anyway as a person who is in the world, who is influenced by music that's around you, and some of those influences may go into the music that you write yourself?

That's a good point, and I think that's true.

That you can't help, you're not writing in isolation, you're writing based on everything you've ever heard

and kind of

processing it through

your own sensibilities.

I love your face so, like a painting by Picasso.

The eyes to the right,

the nose to the left.

Other faces make me border, but your features are all in a nice order.

Order.

The song on the new record, The Avant-Garde, made me laugh.

And that's definitely one of yours where you're playing around, I suppose, with a character or a shifting perspective that we're not entirely supposed to take as

gospel.

Well,

there's a bit of me in there.

There's a bit of me in there.

To quote from the lyrics.

The avant-garde, it's deceptively weighty.

It's profoundly absurd.

It's whatever fits.

It's the avant-garde.

It doesn't mean shit, it's the avant-garde.

Well,

yes, it sounds like it's a scathing criticism.

When I read it out like that, it sounds like a scathing criticism, but then there's another part of the song that goes, I want to go there, I want to go there, I'll take you with me,

I want to go there.

It's, yeah.

So that's what the song is trying to balance, which is true for me, too.

Right, okay.

I often go to performances by kind of experimental groups or whatever it might be, not knowing what it's going to be, not knowing whether it's going to be good or bad or whatever.

And I'm happy to do that.

I feel like that's been really

inspirational to me when I see something that is completely unexpected and I had no idea what it was going to be.

And it ends up being really unusual and inspiring in some way.

But just as often, I've seen things go, oh, that was complete crap.

Or

what did they think they were doing there?

So, if you're like, it's both, it is both, yeah, because that's your background, really, isn't it?

I mean, ever since you were art school, I suppose you were immersed in that world, absolutely, yes, and to some extent, I still am.

Although, maybe this song will put me on the ouchs,

you'll be ejected.

I've heard that song, you're not welcome here.

Get out if you're not prepared to take this seriously.

How old were you when you went to art school?

What would I be?

18, 19, somewhere in there, started going around then.

And at that point you wanted to be a fine artist, right?

Absolutely.

That was my ambition.

I loved making music with friends, making music myself, but I never thought that I had

the chops,

the skills to

make a living doing that.

I thought, oh, that's just something I do for fun.

But

the art stuff,

I'm going to focus on that.

What kind of work were you making?

Well,

let's see.

At one point I did a series of questionnaires and mailed them out and handed them out to people.

And one asked people's opinions about UFOs.

Pretty straightforward.

Another one asked them their opinions about states, like the states in the United States.

But

some of the questions didn't have a real rational response, like, which state has the best shape?

And I think there was another series of fake UFO Polaroids in keeping with the UFO stuff.

And then

I faked evidence of UFO landings.

That's very forward-thinking, of course.

Very forward, but yes, maybe a little bit too much because

I had dropped out of art school and I tried to get back in because

the jobs that I was getting after I dropped out were real menial work.

I mean, I was getting strong, physically strong, from lifting things.

What were you doing?

Well, you know, lifting bags of cement,

loading them onto trucks or whatever.

Yeah, you build up some

muscles, but you don't get much in the way of pay.

So I thought, oh, maybe I should go back and see if I can graduate.

So I showed, but I had been making this work in the meantime.

So I showed them to one of the instructors, and I said,

we don't teach this kind of stuff.

Fake UFO photos.

What are you doing, Bern?

Yes.

But they gave me good advice.

They said, you should just go to New York and try your luck.

Oh, that's what they said.

Yeah.

So this was at.

This is at a nice school in Rhode Island.

Oh, there you are in Rhode Island.

Try your luck.

And they thought you were going to play music there, did they?

No, they thought I was going to

do more art and kind of attempt to get it shown in galleries there.

Okay.

What would you be showing, though?

Your questionnaires or your fake UFO photos?

Well, yeah, something like that.

Were you doing...

I know you did a bit of performance as well, right?

I did a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, I did a little bit.

Was that the idea, though, that you would do more of that kind of thing and be part of that world, the performance art world?

No, I think that was kind of a fun thing, although a friend and I formed a little group, a two-person group, and we would be busking on the streets, not in New York, but in a bit in Baltimore and out west and San Francisco and places like that.

I played violin and ukulele, and he played accordion.

We tend to do older songs, and there was a little bit of a performance thing involved, where sometimes I

would

maybe stand on one leg.

And I would look to the audience, like, aren't you amazed that I'm doing this and playing the ukulele?

Give me some love, come on.

And you had, you were wearing a sort of straight expression, were you?

Yeah, wearing a straight expression.

Like,

I'm going to show you something really amazing.

I'm multi-talented.

Yeah, multi-talented.

Yes, I can stand on one leg.

Actually, we did quite well.

Did you?

We'd gather a crowd.

I was dressed in like an old, you know, vintage shop suit.

I remember one time a little kid came up to me and go, Hey, mister, hey, mister, are you one of those guys that won't ride in cars?

What does that mean?

He thought it was an Amish guy.

Oh, okay.

Yes, yeah.

Not a hobo.

No, no.

Was that around the time where you shaved half your beard off?

Yes, I did, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the beard helped

was probably probably helped convince this kid that I was

Amish, but then I shaved it off.

And that, and as a performance, yeah, yeah, but you know, you can only do that once.

Sure.

Or you'd have to be a long wait between performances.

Yeah.

And did you like that world, though?

Did you like the people?

I was at art school.

And I did like it, but I was suspicious of some of the more pretentious people there.

Or I felt like I just couldn't, in good conscience, get on board with it and do it properly.

I always was slightly taking the piss.

Yourself?

Me, yeah, yeah.

But was every everybody at some point was expected to do a performance?

Not really.

You didn't have to, but there was a lot of people who were.

Who were doing that?

Yeah, yeah.

I did a sculpture degree, and so there was very little sculpting of wood and stone.

It was mainly, I did a lot of videos, a lot of other people people were doing performances.

I remember someone, their performance was they built a

big chair out of their clothes and then they sprinkled it with icing sugar and then they sat on the chair and they ate doughnuts for an hour.

So there was a lot of that kind of thing.

I didn't really have, I didn't have anything like that to offer.

But were you on board with that kind of thing or were you friends with all those folks?

Let's see.

I probably knew some of them.

I probably knew some of them.

Not all, but some.

I think I was more attracted to the, I guess, the fringe theater groups in New York at that point.

This is when I first moved to New York.

They at least, I have to say, were very rigorous about what they did.

They rehearsed.

They would adjust things and whatever.

So there was a

real, to some extent, professional sensibility behind what they were doing, even if it was very out there.

Whereas I think what you're describing is some of the artists who decided that they would do a performance

didn't do it rigorously.

They wouldn't rehearse or couldn't think in theatrical terms of, okay, what's going to look right?

How does this appear?

What does this mean?

All that kind of thing.

They were sometimes really unusual, but I really liked them.

Were you doing stuff with video back then?

I did a little bit, but not much.

Yeah.

Presume.

Did you meet Tony Basil around that time?

That was a little later.

That was in probably around 1980, somewhere around there.

Okay.

She'd already been working with Bruce Connor and people like that.

She'd been working with Bruce Connor.

She introduced me to Bruce Connor, who did a couple of videos for the Bush of Ghost record a little bit after that.

But Brian Eno and I were working on that record in Los Angeles for a little while.

And maybe she'd reached out to us or he talked to her or whatever, but she'd worked with this dance group called the Lockers.

They were on Soul Train occasionally.

We'd seen them.

Right, it's a sort of early body popping.

Yeah, a bit like that.

The lockers were a little bit different.

And then she said, oh, I'm working with another group of street dancers.

that they were called the Electric Boogaloos.

And they were doing a lot of popping and robot kind of stuff and all those kinds of moves.

And we just fell in love with that and just thought, oh, that's really amazing.

That's what they're doing.

Super inventive and kind of a whole new way of thinking about the body and how you can dance and that kind of thing.

So I kind of commissioned her to do one for a talking head song.

Cross-eyed and painless.

Yeah.

I wasn't in the video, which might have hurt at getting.

airplay, but yeah.

So that was before you did Once in a Lifetime together?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

And am I right in thinking that you literally sort of just went into an office and did it over a few hours?

It took a little bit longer than that.

It sounded very DIY when I read about it.

It actually, like I was saying about some of the theater groups, it took a lot of rehearsal.

Right, okay.

Tony was very good about that.

In that one, we kind of, I think it was, I was doing the choreography, her day job as a choreographer, and she would be the director.

So

we kind of storyboarded it out: like, what move do I make doing these lyrics?

What to this, what to do that.

And then she said, I want you to learn how to do it top to bottom, as if you're on stage and you're going to go do this move and then do this one, then do that one, do bend over backwards and do all this and that.

And so would go every few days into a rehearsal studio, and she'd put me through my paces.

And the movement came out of movements that I invented or that seemed to me related to kind of ecstatic

religious traditions.

And I'd mix those together with my own movements.

And then she would help shape it and go, oh, that's really good.

But

keep your legs more aligned.

She knew what was going to work for the camera.

Yeah.

And you shot the thing against blue screen?

Parts of it were shot against blue screen.

Right.

Yeah.

So who edited that, for example?

I think we edited it together.

It was all storyboarded.

So it was just like this shot goes here, this one goes here, and this one goes here.

And you knew you would have like multiple versions of yourself.

Yeah, that was in the storyboards as well.

Right.

And that was like one of the first videos that got played on MTV, wasn't it?

Yeah,

lucky for me, lucky for us, that

they were desperate for content.

Did you know that MTV was a thing when you made it, or did you make it on spec and then suddenly MTV started?

MTV had, I think, already started, but just.

They had just like a handful of videos, and those would get played over and over and over again because there weren't enough.

And so I kind of knew that there's a good chance if I do something and it works, they'll start playing it.

And they did.

Which was a good thing because

in the US anyway, radio wouldn't play that song.

Why not?

Radio in the US is fairly segregated, still is, I think.

And the rock stations thought it was a little too funky.

And the black stations thought it was a little too white.

It fell in the middle somewhere.

And so they all avoided it.

But it was getting a lot of play on this video channel.

And were you aware of people copying the moves and dancing around?

Did you see people doing that?

No, no, I didn't see that.

We all did that.

When we were, especially after we saw Stop Making Sense, I suppose, then it was a gift to people like me who aren't naturally physically confident on a dance floor.

But suddenly we had this arsenal of moves that we saw you doing.

And it was fun to do them.

It was fun to do the swaying, wobbly one

and anything that made a virtue of our awkwardness, you know.

And the running man as well was a good one that we did a lot.

So I thank you for that.

You're You're welcome.

Thank you.

You make videos still though, right?

It's still something you enjoy.

I haven't directed one in a while, but I worked with a guy named Gabe on one for this new song.

I've kind of sketched out some ideas for another one.

I mean, it's a lovely medium, isn't it?

Yeah, it's pretty nice.

What are some of your favorites over the years?

Not necessarily by you, or you can include ones by you if you want.

Wow, I remember the one for Sinead O'Connor doing the the Prince song.

I think it was mainly just a close-up of her face.

Possibly I might be misremembering that or maybe just felt like that at the time, that all the emotion was just coming from her face and you didn't need to see anything else.

At the end of the day though, that's the stuff that cuts through, isn't it?

I always think that about special effects and all those kinds of things, it's all good fun, but that is the stuff that stays with you is

that shot of someone like that, and it's so powerful, isn't it?

And she starts to cry, and it's devastating.

It's amazing.

Plus, good song.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Did you ever, did you used to like Michel Gondry when he was firing on all?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Never worked with him, but yeah, those videos he did were great, really great.

I invited him to see my last tour.

American Utopia.

Yeah.

He could come to see that.

He didn't know anything about it.

He told me afterwards.

I came there, and then the curtain opens, and it's you sitting at a table on an empty stage, and you start singing and holding a brain.

And he thought to himself, Oh no,

this is what the whole show is going to be.

This is going to be this incredibly indulgent

thing that David's doing.

Oh, God.

Yes, he's going to sit at that table for an hour.

Well, you can do that next time.

How come Spike Lee ended up being attached to that then and directing that?

Was he someone that you knew already?

Spike was someone I knew already.

He'd shot

performance things

before, and I thought, okay, he knows...

the technical problems of capturing something live.

So I talked to him and said, you want to do it?

You want to to do it?

Yeah, please.

He said, yes.

Let's find the money and see if we can do this.

I loved it.

Was it a composite in the same way that Stopped Making Sense was?

Yeah, it was shot.

It was

mainly one performance, but there were elements of like

the previous night and then some close-ups and pickup shots the day after.

Right.

And it sounded so good.

Do you do overdubs on a thing like that?

No, no overdubs on that one.

Good sound mixer.

Yes.

Yes, please.

Yep.

Yes.

I read on your website that you got asked to write the theme tune for Mad Men.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

I did a demo of a a song.

I guess they didn't like it.

What kind of thing was it?

Well, there's an image, I think there's an animated image at the beginning of the show of a guy falling.

Yeah.

So I did a whole thing about...

It was kind of lyrics about

falling and

for a job like that then, do you do a whole song or do you just do a sort of 40 second mini song?

About 40 seconds, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I thought, well, we can repeat the verse,

but if need be, if you wanted a longer one, but for an opening credit, yes, you know, the 40 seconds is plenty.

Yeah.

In the end, I think they just used an instrumental, right?

With slight hip-hop-y flourishes.

Yeah, I think so.

I think so.

Something like that.

But you've done, obviously, you did music for, you have done music for films, you've done music for The Last Emperor, you did also music for Big Love.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, which was a great

one season of

TV series called Big Love that took place in Mormon communities.

That's right.

It was a brilliant program.

I loved it.

Did you watch it?

Yes, I've certainly watched that season.

Yeah, of course.

I had a grand idea when I first started working on that.

I thought I wanted the audience to feel the kind of spiritual background or religious background behind their community that was the basis of their community and their actions and their kind of marrying multiple wives and all that.

So I looked up the titles of Mormon hymns and wrote a bunch of music just based on the titles for

strings and brass players that would sound very kind of like a local band playing from the hymnal.

Well, they didn't like much, they didn't like much of that.

It didn't really work for a TV show.

They wanted things that were kind of more,

give us something that's a little more a darker mood, more something more ominous.

Something they can use underneath a scene.

Yeah, underneath the scene, it would be more like that.

So I learned something there.

But in the end, they were happy with what they got.

Do you find that music affects you differently as you get older?

It's possible that having had some experience making music and performing it, that I hear it a little bit differently.

I can hear kind of more of what's going on internally in the music and in the production and those kinds of things that I might not have been aware of before.

But at the same time, I think a lot of those responses are kind of visceral.

And even if you don't know technically how they're done, and I still don't know technically how a lot of it's done, you kind of respond intuitively.

And how about your emotional response to music?

I'm asking because the older I get, the more it seems like there's a slight element of danger to listening to things that I haven't heard for a while, you know what I mean?

Because the emotional response will be quite overwhelming.

You're being patched back into

really deep memories and emotional memories and music has a way of doing that, I think, more than any other medium, like in a more intense and powerful way.

Yeah, I agree.

Music can do that.

Music kind of bypasses a lot of the

maybe more analytical parts of our brain and

can go straight for the emotional part.

It doesn't have to be older stuff that I'm familiar with.

Maybe it can be something new by myself for a newer artist.

Yeah.

But you don't have to sort of tread gingerly before you put a record on, otherwise, you'll be reduced to a puddle of.

No, I love that feeling.

I love that feeling.

If it's just me, I'll sometimes do it intentionally.

Yeah.

Put on something that's going to kind of move me to tears.

Something that'll shred you.

Do you feel that way about photographs?

Family photos or snaps of old friends who maybe aren't around anymore or that kind of thing?

Oh, I don't look at those very often.

I hope they're all archived, but I don't look at them very often.

I remember when my dad was getting really old and kind of had

dementia, I could pull out a photo album of his family when he was younger and his brother and various relatives and whatever, and suddenly he'd kind of snap out of it and

start talking about them.

So strange, isn't it?

And it's all locked away.

And famously, music is the same, though, as well, I think.

Yeah, yeah, I'd also put on music that I knew he'd listened to

years ago.

And you can remember all the words and it's all still there, isn't it?

I was watching a documentary about Pee Wee Herman the other day.

It starts off with him talking about his memories of being a child.

He's got very clear memories of what his life was like and the way he saw the world.

Do you have that?

Yes, but I think I've grown suspicious of my childhood memories.

I've

discovered over time that some of them are false, some of them are things that never happened.

Discovered from talking to other people about them.

Yeah.

Talking to other people about them, and they'll look at the dates and go, David, that couldn't have happened.

Yeah.

The dates are all wrong.

I think you're mistaken.

And I'll look at it and go, oh, yeah.

But

I already kind of incorporated it into

my memory and my sense of who I am, what happened to me.

And then I realized, oh no,

that part of who I am doesn't exist.

I just made it up, probably because it made a better story.

Or it makes you feel better about yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Does finding that kind of thing out unsettle you?

Oh, it's very unsettling.

It is, isn't it?

Very unsettling, not just for this one thing, but the implication is

how many other

things that I think happened to me didn't happen.

Yeah.

I remember the first time I heard about the idea that your memories are

just memories of memories.

It's just a kind of palimpsest of recollections overwriting the one underneath.

And they're so until eventually they're quite a long way.

From

how it began.

Yeah.

And

along those lines,

the more you remember something, the more it gets overwritten and revised.

So the more you remember it, the further it gets from the truth.

Yeah.

Do you keep a journal?

I used to keep a dream journal.

I don't remember my dreams very often at all, but it must have been some

kind of traumatic moment in my life or what was happening around me.

It was a period when I had a number of dreams.

So I would keep a little journal and often it meant like doing little drawings because you can't always explain it.

It's some nonsensical drawing.

And do you ever go back to those and draw inspiration from them?

Or was that sort of therapy for you?

It was meant to be therapy.

Yes.

Although, in retrospect, now, if I look at it, I go, this is so obvious.

This is so obvious.

Things were going bad for you at that point.

And so you dreamed of a giant turd.

And,

well,

that's pretty clear.

At the time, I was completely baffled.

Why am I dreaming of turds?

Yes.

Might have been a gut issue.

Yeah,

but it wasn't.

I mean, do you feel sort of

guilty watching stuff trawling through the past too much?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'll watch enough to give my approval on something being released, but then I don't know.

That's it.

That's the end of it.

Then it's like,

I don't want to look at that anymore.

When you do have to look back at things, sometimes journalists I've seen will sit you down in front of a piece of footage on the laptop and get you to watch it.

Presumably they okay that with you beforehand.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're okay to do it.

Yeah, once in a while.

I mean, that must be weird, right?

Yeah, it's a pretty weird sensation.

Not all of us have...

moments in our lives captured like that.

It's an odd thing.

Do you think about what was going on

in your sort of internal life when you look at footage of you back in CBGBs or wherever it might be?

Friends sometimes remind me, oh,

do you remember that person you were going out with then?

Something like that, but

that's not what comes to mind.

It's something like footage from an old performance.

I only see the performance.

I only see,

oh, that's what we were doing then.

Oh, that's.

I see, I see.

Wow,

my singing sounds really different now.

You know, I just I'll think of it in terms of the performance.

I remember reading you saying that you

couldn't quite relate to the person that wrote a lot of those early songs.

You don't really remember how

you got there.

Is that right?

Yeah,

none of us are the same person that we were,

you know, decades

ago.

And yeah, I'm no exception.

And

it feels like the person who wrote those songs 40, 50 years ago, whenever it was, yeah, it was a different person with different concerns.

And yeah, I go,

I couldn't write a song like some of those now, even if I wanted to.

But you don't listen to those songs, or when you hear them, you don't sort of go, oh, I remember what I was trying to do.

Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, absolutely.

I can hear that and go, I remember what I was trying to do.

Right.

And And

sometimes it comes across as being like, oh, you missed that by a bit

for what you were trying to do.

And then are there other times when it's the reverse, when you go, how did I do that?

Yeah, there's certain things I'll hear, older things, and I go, oh, that's...

You really had a kind of peculiar idea and you followed it through.

Can you think of any examples of that kind of feeling?

Yeah, there's, well, there's a song called The Good Thing

on one of the early Talking Heads records.

I remember that was an attempt to write lyrics in the style of a bad translation of like Mao's Little Red Book or something like that.

I will fight the fight with my heart.

Yes,

something like that.

That came very stilted, badly translated English.

And I thought, oh, I'll write something in that, with that kind of language, which I did.

In retrospect, I go,

why did I do that?

It works though, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

It kind of works, but

it's a pretty odd idea.

It is an odd idea, but it's a very bright, upbeat song.

Like, it's really quite a happy song.

Well, yeah, it's supposed to

rouse the masses.

Exactly.

That is quite a bright, upbeat album, isn't it?

I think of it like that anyway.

Well, it's got the big country on it as well, doesn't it?

And that's

a funny song

because you're looking out of the window of an aeroplane, down at the land masses below, and thinking about what the lives of the people you're looking down on might be like.

Yeah,

in the end, I say to myself, for no apparent reason,

I just say, no, not me.

Are you saying no, not for me about the countryside because?

No, I'm saying I wouldn't live like them.

Yeah.

But the description, everything you've heard is very objective and there's nothing wrong with it.

I mean, there's nothing, nothing,

nothing that's described is objectionable.

So

what's with this guy who

doesn't seem to like it at all?

I wouldn't do the things

that enormous people do.

I wouldn't live with

you paid in time.

I was curious to know if you can still do a Scottish accent.

I wouldn't want to test it on you,

test it in public, but I have done.

Come on.

Because you were living in Scotland until you were eight, right?

No, no.

I was younger.

We moved to Canada until I was eight.

And then,

but my parents had strong accents and Glasgow accents, and that's what I heard.

And then we'd go back every other summer or something like that.

No,

I'm not going to do it.

Yeah.

But it went sort of for kind of hiking and walking and sky recently recently and got inspired.

So I started immediately singing in a fake Scottish accent these fake Scottish songs like

Ach Jimmy, what are you doing?

You cannot pee amongst the ruins.

I mean there was a song about I

sold my love to the fairies.

They were all just made up stuff.

But close enough.

I want to hear the end of Ox Jimmy, what are you doing in your canopy amongst the ruins?

Well, okay.

I don't know what I'm going to do with that stuff.

Next album.

Yeah.

Under a pseudonym.

Are you not tempted to go up and play in Glasgow and just put a bit of a Scottish twang on some of your lyrics?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

No.

Ask yourself,

how did I get here?

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Continue.

What time is it?

No time to look back.

Hey, welcome back, Podcats.

That was David Byrne.

And I'm very grateful to him and his team for getting that meeting to happen.

It was very exciting.

I haven't listened to Louie's podcast with David yet, but I talked to Louie about it and actually it sounded like he had a really good conversation with him and got some good stuff out of him, which was probably little bit

more along the lines of what Talking Heads fans might want to hear.

I don't know, haven't heard it.

I'm sure it's very good.

I will be checking it out.

But I loved meeting David.

A reminder that his album, Who is the Sky, is out on September the 5th.

So check it out.

The next big music release on the calendar this year, of course, is Buckle Up by Adam Buxton out on Decca Records on the 12th of September.

There's a link in the description if you would like to pre-order a vinyl copy which comes with some beautiful high-quality signed artwork.

In the last couple of weeks I have been rehearsing with the album's producer Joe Mount of Metronomy fame as well as a couple of current and ex-Metronomy members.

with a view to playing a handful of live shows this year, like fairly short sets,

just to see how they go, see what they sound like.

I mean, I always wished I could have been in a band at school.

The closest I got, in fact, speaking of David Byrne,

was

being in the shady people.

And

I write about it in Ramble Book.

It was, and still is,

a shameful memory

of

getting pissed before the gig.

We were, one of the songs the band was playing was Cross-Eyed and Painless, talking heads cover.

And I was doing the facts are simple and facts are straight.

Facts are lazy and facts are late, rapping bit.

But all the hard lads turned up to the music center where the gig was happening.

And I just got rattled.

They started going, talking heads, talking heads, in a sneery way, especially as I was wearing an oversized kind of waiter's jacket, which I fancied made me look a bit like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense.

Anyway,

oh dear, it's in my top 10 shameful memory bank.

Anyway, I'm hoping that this year's live shows won't

turn out like that.

We're not covering cross-eyed and painless.

We're doing some very low-key ones here and there in the next few weeks, but I think the plan is to do a mini residency, or at least a couple of nights, at the Norwich Arts Centre later in the year.

I'll let you know if and when that happens.

And if you fancy a trip to Norwich, we can have some great music fun together.

And if you'd like, I'll sign your copy of Buckle Up.

The band, I think they're just called the Adam Buxton Band, we will be playing at the album launch at Rough Trade East on September the 15th, but that show is now sold out.

I might see if some of the some of the guys can come along to the show that I'm doing at the Royal Festival Hall on the 26th of October.

That's mainly a book show which starts at 7.30 and will last around 90 minutes with book signing afterwards.

But I don't know, maybe we might be able to get a couple of songs in there too.

And if you can't make the Royal Festival Hall at the end of October, there's another book show a couple of weeks before on Friday, the 10th of October, as part of the Wimbledon Book Festival.

I will be talking about and around

I Love You Buy, reminiscing about DIY TV in the 90s, that kind of thing, with writer-broadcaster Star Trek nerd and friend of the podcast, Samira Ahmed.

Always good to talk to her, so I'm looking forward to that.

That's at the new Wimbledon Theatre.

Show starts at 8 p.m.

on the 10th of October and again that'll last around 90 minutes.

Book signing afterwards, I think.

Cultural recommendations?

Well, recently I've listened to quite a bit of Ezra Klein.

I've always liked him.

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with his podcast, The Ezra Klein Show.

Incredibly intelligent,

New York Times journalist

and

very thoughtful, interesting, thought-provoking, unsettling conversations that he often has with people on his show.

Recently, I listened to the episode that got a lot of coverage outside of his podcast with pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil,

who was locked up by the US government.

That is a good interview.

And yes, it was very controversial for some people.

There's a really good episode, if you're a subscriber to Ezra Klein's show

that you can listen to with him responding to some of the criticism he got after airing that episode.

That was very interesting as well.

The one, though, that has dominated the last few weeks for me was with a human rights lawyer, Philippe Sands,

who wrote a book called East West Street.

Actually, Seamus, my podcast producer, bought it for me

several years ago, I'm ashamed to admit.

And I sort of started reading it and then got sidetracked.

Anyway, I finished reading it now in the wake of listening to the podcast that he did with Ezra Klein, where they discuss the concept of genocide and the genesis of that term, which is really the basis of the incredible story, which is part biographical, part historical, told in East West Street.

It's partly the story of the Holocaust during the Second World War,

but then also the Nuremberg trials

and the attempts to prosecute for a new crime of genocide.

Anyway, Ezra Klein and Philippe Sands talk about

that with reference to what's happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza.

And again, as you can imagine, there was a strong response to that podcast episode, which he also talks about in the follow-up episode.

So that's where I've been at, but I do recommend Ezra Klein and East West Street.

Okay, that's it for this week.

Oh, my goodness.

We've been on an epic journey together.

I mean, you listen right to the end.

Maybe some of you even listen to the whole intro as well.

Thank you so much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his additional conversation editing and general production support.

Much appreciated, Seamus.

Thanks to Helen Green.

She does the artwork for this podcast.

She's the best.

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard hooking me up with sponsors at ACAST.

But thanks, perhaps most of all, to you.

It's a lot of podcasts out there, and I appreciate you coming back for this one.

Would it be appropriate to have a creepy hug?

Come here, hey.

Good to see you.

Oh, lovely, warm Norfolk wind.

Oh yeah, sorry about that.

Until next time, please go carefully.

And for what it's worth, I love you.

Bye.

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