David Byrne reveals the Talking Heads song “more relevant than ever” due to ICE raids
David Byrne has reflected on the lasting legacy of Talking Heads’ ‘Life During Wartime’, which he believes is now “more relevant than ever”.
The track, which appeared on their 1979 album Fear of Music, remains a staple of Byrne’s live sets all these years later, and continues to resonate with audiences despite almost being 50-years-old.
“The guy I depict in ‘Life During Wartime’ is a very rational type,” Byrne previously told Nick Kent in 1979 about the song’s meaning.
He added, “When I wrote that, I was thinking not so much of a World War Three thing so much as a terrorist attack – a Baader-Meinhof situation, that would have escalated into pretty much civil war. And the narrator is just very logically running down a list of things – materialistic stuff that suddenly means nothing when a real state of emergency is declared.”
Now, in a new interview with The Guardian, Byrne was probed about the song by a fan who wrote in and asked, “It strikes me that ‘Life During Wartime’ could translate to being on tour in a band – ‘A van that’s loaded with weapons, sleep in the daytime, work in the night-time’. etc. Am I on the right track?”
In response, Byrne admitted, “A young band just starting off on tour where the guitars are their weapons? I can’t say you’re wrong, but it hadn’t occurred to me.”
He then shared his newfound belief in the song’s meaning, adding, “I do think the song as a whole seems in a way more relevant than ever, especially in the US, with the ICE raids and all that.”
Byrne has been making this point on tour by including footage of ICE during his performances of ‘Life During Wartime’ on his current run of dates.
“I licensed some ICE footage to show at the very, very end of that song. If we showed it for the whole song, it would be kind of sad, depressing, but we show it at the very end,” he explained on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
He elaborated, “We start off with some footage that I saw of what looked like a delivery guy on a bike being chased by the ICE guys, and he gets away! It was in Chicago. We debuted that clip because they kept coming, they keep coming.”
Byrne is currently on tour in Europe with dates lined up in Spain and Portugal over the next week before he returns to the UK for a show at The Piece Hall in Halifax, three gigs in Edinburgh, and a UK-festival exclusive at Latitude later this month.
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