David Byrne and Brian Eno, both Dork Report favorites, col­lab­o­rated exten­sively between 1978–1980. Many of these clas­sic albums have passed into the musi­cal canon, most espe­cially Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light (1980) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). I believe there are some lin­ger­ing rumors of inter­per­sonal fric­tion, cer­tainly within the four Talk­ing Heads, but Byrne and Eno appear to have remained in light, as it were. As Byrne relates the story in the liner notes to their new album Every­thing That Hap­pens Will Hap­pen Today, the pos­si­bil­ity of his com­plet­ing sev­eral of Eno’s stock­piled instru­men­tal demos arose over din­ner. The even­tual result is a bril­liant new album that is unmis­tak­ably the prod­uct of these two unique musi­cians, but is cer­tainly no sequel or retread of past glories.

Squint and you might see more than some blotches of color

Tour­ing to sup­port the new mate­r­ial, Byrne chal­lenged him­self with the self-imposed restric­tion to draw from only the five albums on which he worked with Eno: More Songs about Build­ings and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Every­thing That Hap­pens Will Hap­pen Today. Even with this self-imposed lim­i­ta­tion of albums that are all, frankly, kind of weird, it’s amaz­ing how many toe-tapping pop songs they contain.

The excel­lently sequenced set list, mostly alter­nat­ing between the weird and (rel­a­tively) nor­mal, kept the mas­sive Radio City Music Hall audi­ence singing along. Strange Over­tones, my favorite song from the new album, came first. Talk­ing Heads’ Crosseyed and Pain­less proved an early cli­max, bring­ing the entire audi­ence to their feet for most of the rest of the show. The only dis­ap­point­ment was that Byrne selected only one sin­gle track from the leg­endary My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: Help Me Some­body. It was imag­i­na­tively rearranged with live voices replac­ing the original’s found vocals (or as Byrne noted that we would call them today, sam­ples). Why not try the same with some of the other great tracks on that album?

The long white splotch in the mid­dle is David Byrne and the Rockettes!

The stage design was per­fectly aus­tere, and decep­tively sim­ple. I espe­cially liked the stark, mono­chro­matic light­ing design. The entire band was clad in white, and three mod­ern dancers accom­pa­nied sev­eral songs with wit­tily chore­o­graphed rou­tines. The show cli­maxed with a truly barn­storm­ing ver­sion of Burn­ing Down the House, with the entire band dressed in frilly tutus. It could only be com­pleted by the star­tling appear­ance by… wait for it… the bloody Rock­ettes! OMGWTF!? Need­less to say, the crowd went bananas.

In short, I had a grand time. Here at The Dork Report, I have fewer qualms about rat­ing movies on a five-star scale than I do con­certs. Movies are cheap enough to rent in con­sume in large gulps. I end up see­ing many bad or mediocre movies, but few con­cerst that sucks. The likely expla­na­tion is the expense involved, which often lim­its the con­certs I go to to artists that I already very much like. The only rea­son I didn’t rate this par­tic­u­lar show higher is that I could imag­ine that if I could time-travel back to the 1980s and see the orig­i­nal Talk­ing Heads (prefer­ably dur­ing the period Adrian Belew was in their live band), that would eas­ily by five stars.

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Offi­cial album site: EverythingThatHappens.com

Buy David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album Every­thing That Hap­pens Will Hap­pen Today from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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