‘The Catherine Wheel’: David Byrne’s criminally underrated funk opera masterpiece
Hidden in plain sight in the midst of his prodigious creative output, there is an unfairly overlooked gem in David Byrne’s discography that I feel is an absolutely monumental masterpiece of late 20th-century music, one right up there with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and his seminal collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I refer, of course, to the seamless funk opera score Byrne created for choreographer Twyla Tharp in 1981, The Catherine Wheel. Unless you were a big Talking Heads fan or are a David Byrne completist, chances are this one might have passed you by.
By 1981, David Byrne was already halfway to becoming the twitchy prophet of American art-funk, but The Catherine Wheel is where things got… weirdly pure. You had Reagan just slithering into office, the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over every teenager’s head like a low-budget John Carpenter plot, and here’s Byrne, sweating out manic percussion patterns with a cadre of cosmic funk wizards and experimental savants in a ballet score for Twyla Tharp.
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