Remembering when David Byrne, Kimbra & The Roots teamed up to cover David Bowie’s ‘Fame’
David Bowie and David Byrne, the otherworldly pair of double ds, represent forces that helped to illuminate the bright new avenues to music just as it appeared to be approaching a stilted dead-end. These pioneers grabbed music by the lapels and shook it like a Skoda speeding over a cattle-grid in their own wild, yet gentle and humble fashion.
If you like one of them, then the chances are that you’ll like the other. Thus, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the funky duo were great pals. When he inducted Byrne inducted Bowie into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, he eulogised his friend’s chameleonic ways, citing: “He was a shrink, a priest, a sex object, and a prophet of doom.”
“We’d heard about the Warhol scene at Max’s Kansas City,” Byrne told Pitchfork regarding their first meeting, “and so my friend and I went in there – with the full beard and everything – curious to see where the cool people were. We were so out of place, and I remember David Bowie came in dressed in his full glam outfit, with the orange hair, the spacesuit, everything. And I just thought, ‘We don’t fit in here. We better go.”
But that wild show of individuality would soon rub off on Byrne, and while he’d take his artistic output in a different direction, the notion of being yourself and having fun with it shone through. As his Talking Heads bandmate, Chris Frantz, would later comment: “We wanted to have a band that spoke to people the way David Bowie and his band had spoken to us, with a soulful intelligence and artistic integrity.”
Understanding your place in the world is something that Bowie was big on. “Never play to the gallery,” Bowie once said. “Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society… I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people’s expectations.”
Thus, it seems fitting that Byrne chose to cover ‘Fame’ when he crafted an ensemble to honour his late friend. The song came at a time when the flops were long behind ‘The Starman’ and he had hit celestial heights. So, he enlisted a man who had been coasting these lofty heights for a while in John Lennon, and as he mused: “Fame itself, of course, doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant. That must be pretty well known by now.”
Byrne grasps the duality of the track alongside Kimbra & The Roots. The exultant melody is a show of the expression but then the disjointed dissonance that creeps in shows that it ain’t all rosy in Hollywood, so to speak.
