David Byrne on Talking Heads and ‘Here Lies Love’
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, musician David Byrne joins Lilah in the FT’s New York newsroom to talk about how he makes creative choices. Byrne has been an enduring cultural figure for more than four decades, known for always doing something new. His current project is Here Lies Love, a disco musical on Broadway about Imelda Marcos, a former politician and first lady in the Philippines. He’s also revisiting his days with Talking Heads, as a remastered version of their seminal concert documentary Stop Making Sense will be rereleased this month by the indie studio A24. Byrne rewatched it recently, about 40 years after its release. “I’m looking at my younger self … and he seems like a stranger,” he tells Lilah. “And I go, ‘Who is this strange guy?’”
– Read Lilah’s profile of Byrne at https://on.ft.com/44SpQLK
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco
Clip of Burning Down The House is from Stop Making Sense (1984)
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I went to a musical recently on Broadway called Here Lies Love. |
| 0:06.1 | And it was honestly different from any musical that I have ever been to. |
| 0:09.7 | For one thing, the music that it's set to is disco. |
| 0:17.4 | The theater also didn't look like a theater. |
| 0:20.6 | It looked like a dance club. |
| 0:22.4 | And a lot of the audience was ushered onto the set |
| 0:25.0 | with the actors on Catwalks above them. |
| 0:27.6 | So during the performance, they had us do synchronized dances |
| 0:30.8 | and sing some of the songs. |
| 0:33.5 | I basically felt like an extra in the musical. |
| 0:36.3 | Let's give our people a break.. Let's give our people a break. |
| 0:38.1 | You say, give our people a break. |
| 0:40.6 | Over here, let's give our people a break. |
| 0:42.9 | Now let me hear it. |
| 0:43.9 | Give our people a break. |
| 0:45.8 | Uptown. |
| 0:46.3 | The subject matter is pretty unusual, too. |
| 0:48.9 | Here lies love takes place in the Philippines |
| 0:50.9 | during the Ferdinand and Imel de Marcos dictatorship, |
| 0:53.9 | mostly in the 1970s. The mainand and Imel de Marcos dictatorship, mostly in the 1970s. |
| 0:55.7 | The main character is Imel de Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. |
| 1:00.4 | A lot of people know her for having the world's largest shoe collection |
... |
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