born under punches

Me and Jen went to see David Byrne in Sheffield last week, and it was top class, quite unlike the merely “cute” spectacle the New York Times criticised. Sure, it was slick, but that didn’t preclude constant thrills – “Strange Overtones” all smooth and liquid-hipped, “Help Me Somebody” startlingly funky, and classic Talking Heads material rendered with all its Stop Making Sense big band might. It reminded me of Brian Eno’s assertion that most successful popular music has an element of call and response in it – the three backing singers provided a stunning counterpoint and conversation with Byrne throughout, as well as splendidly regimented chatter during “The Great Curve”. And Byrne himself was in very fine voice.

Something that is made plain throughout is the steadiness of the Byrne backbeat – the funk comes from the rhythm guitar licks, and occasionally the percussion, with the drums opting for a metronomic pulse often with sections ending in a colossal pair of on-beats (“Take Me To The River”, “Crosseyed And Painless”). Except for “Born Under Punches”, for which I was caught between an almost primal need to move somewhere to start dancing and an equal desire not to allow my concentration to break for a second. This is a song that itches – its beat prickles with heat before settling on four solid thwacks, and then back to the unsettled paranoia of before. Byrne’s ranting city-dweller (“Drowning cannot hurt a man!”) shakes his fist from his soapbox at the sedate domestic troubles happening above him (“All I want is to breathe / Won’t you breathe with me”), while a Greek chorus looks down on it all, shaking their heads: “The heat goes on, the heat goes on”. The live version brought out all of these levels and fully evoked its sweaty, mournful frustration.

Talking Heads – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)