Exploring David Byrne’s hot take that London isn’t actually a city
As anyone who is an active fan of Talking Heads will know, David Byrne has a lot of unique takes and experiences.
Granted, most of the best musicians across history are all similar when it comes to standing out from the crowd, but what makes Byrne so endearing is that, no matter what he does or when he does it, you know you’re going to be getting something he’s made purely in the name of art.
When you encounter musicians who have been in the game as long as Byrne has, this is fairly rare. After all, when Talking Heads’ success, it wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented for Byrne to attempt to reinvent the wheel as a solo artist, especially when he knows what works well and what doesn’t.
However, there’s always an unpredictability with Byrne that makes the music feel even more special when it does arrive, because you always know that whatever he makes has been made with his entire heart and soul. And each time, there seems to be just the right amount of everything you already know and love about the singer for it to resonate all the same.
While it seems that Byrne has always had a certain style, especially when it comes to lyrical wordplay and occupying that strange, uncanny space between the literal and the figurative, this is something that he honed as he progressed through the band’s first few records. From the beginning, the vision centred on combining all facets of the individual musicians’ talents, but it all came together during the creation of Fear of Music.
This was the record that really proved just how much of a musical match in heaven Byrne and Brian Eno were, especially when you look at all the ways that Eno helped Byrne to focus on his trademark stream-of-consciousness approach with writing about all the things that were swirling around in his head, even if they didn’t make complete sense.
For instance, Eno had Byrne overcome writer’s block by putting down a handful of random words that came to mind, many of which eventually became song titles, such as ‘Mind’, ‘Paper’, ‘Air’, and ‘Cities’. Within those, Byrne explored many of his own unique views about the world around him, giving voice to all the ways he felt backwards about places and environments that feel different to how they actually are.
In ‘Cities’, for instance, Byrne refers to London as a “small city”. The song tackles a man looking for a city to live in, with London presented as “dark in the daytime” and a place where “people sleep in the daytime”. Describing it as a small city might seem like a choice, but that’s precisely why it makes sense in this context – Byrne isn’t describing its scale; rather, he’s looking at all the ways it’s intertwined with different people and stories: a place dwarfed by its own nuance and entrapment.
As a result, Byrne’s outsider perspective frames London differently, viewing it as a place where many people rarely leave, and, incidentally, a place where you’d only relocate to if you’re prepared to be swallowed by it. As he later illustrated to Uncut, “I think I meant that it was made up of lots of small villages, and people sometimes never ventured out of their little village.”
