Still making sense

By Charlie McCann

David Byrne wears the mess kit of the music-industry musketry: black jacket, black shirt, black trousers. But the Scottish-born musician, whose distinctive voice and strikingly original fusion of genres marked out the American band Talking Heads as soon as it arrived on the scene in 1975, is anything but regular. He doesn’t shake my hand or look at me when introduced. He won’t cast an eye on the results of the photo shoot, saying it would make him feel “self-conscious”. In his bestselling 2012 book, “How Music Works”, Byrne said he had border-line Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic disorder often characterised by above-average intelligence and social awkwardness. He calls himself “an anthropologist from Mars”.

His subject is the ordinary. Now 65, Byrne has made a lifetime study of everyday people, places and objects. He likes to look at things clinically yet with irony, which helps make the commonplace seem strange. In “Stop Making Sense”, the 1984 film of a live Talking Heads concert directed by Jonathan Demme, Byrne performed in a massive, boxy suit, so his head looked as if it had shrunk. “I try to write about small things,” he said in the film. “Paper, animals, a house.” As he has grown older, Byrne’s ambition has become bigger. Grappling with the question of how pop should respond to politics, he has now released his first solo album for 14 years, “American Utopia”, and has just started a world tour.