DAVID BYRNE

Big O have posted a favourite this morning, the master Mr David Byrne from his current UTOPIA tour. I couldn't afford to go see this tour when it came to my nearby music venue here in Oxford but it is getting almost universally spectacular reviews. This ROIO from last month will have to make do . . . . .

Live at the Forest Hills Stadium, Queens, NY; September 15, 2018. Very good FM broadcast.

David Byrne - Utopia: Queens 2018

Big O says:

Amanda Hatfield, brooklynvegan.com:

“I have been on this stage before, but it was a long time ago,” David Byrne said in a brief pause between songs at his Saturday (9/15) night show at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Just over 35 years ago, in August of 1983, Talking Heads performed two shows at the venue, during their “Stop Making Sense” tour. Later the same year, the band filmed three nights of shows at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater, resulting in the heralded concert film Stop Making Sense. For his 2018 solo album American Utopia, Byrne envisioned a show as ambitious as Stop Making Sense - and with his “untethered” world tour, he’s achieved it.The chorus of American Utopia single “I Dance Like This” repeats, “we dance like this, because it feels so damn good.” That line is a good summation of the theme of the entire show: the joy in movement. Byrne and his troupe of musicians and dancers (who are, he confirmed partway through the set, absolutely playing live: “everything you hear coming off this stage is being played by these incredible musicians”) move in closely choreographed forms and lines, but with less military precision and more the natural rhythm of a tight, in-tune band.The staging is a little marching band, a little color guard, a little dance team; Byrne himself is part band-leader, part conductor, and part instigator. He frequently steps back from center stage to give other band members the spotlight, and in their matching grey suits and bare feet, the whole group comes across as a band as egalitarian vision…Much has been made of Byrne’s decision to end each show with a rendition of Janelle Monae’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout,” and it was just as moving in person as accounts I’d read. Merrill Garbus of opening band Tune-Yards joined Byrne’s band as they chanted the names of black lives lost to police brutality, and it gave me chills, all the more in contrast to the joyous dancing scene in the crowd earlier for beloved Talking Heads classics like “Burning Down The House,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “This Must Be the Place.”+ + + + +

Thanks to tamlyn for sharing the show at Dime.

tamlyn noted:

This is an excellent FM recording with some on-the-fly radio editing for language and DJ intrusion.