(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 12 September 2025 21:30, UK
There’s no downplaying just how much Talking Heads and David Byrne did for music. And yet, somehow, they feel criminally underrated.
When you look around now and pay close attention to our biggest stars, Byrne’s name rarely comes up. He’s around, of course, fresh off the back of his latest album, Who Is the Sky?, plus the promo that comes with, launching into his familiar charisma with songs like ‘What Is the Reason for It’ at places like Rough Trade. But it’s hard not to miss his absence where he should have pride of place, beyond subtle sonic references.
It’s not like he ever really went away. He did an exceptional performance alongside Robyn for SNL50. And Talking Heads remains a major cultural talking point regardless of Byrne’s newer material. One of the greatest concert films of all time, Stop Making Sense, was rereleased a couple of years ago, drawing in new fans who looked at Byrne’s weirdly appealing onstage presence and realised nobody, not now or ever, did it like he did.
Yet it feels like there could be more. Aside from the sheer brilliance of their music, a lot of what made Talking Heads work, and something most should pay closer attention to nowadays, is their authenticity. And that loosely meant how they appeared onstage, from the beginning up to some of their more well-known performances. It was almost like everything was improvised, and nothing had that stiff, staged feel.
Beyond Talking Heads, this has always been Byrne’s forte. If you’re ever lucky enough to catch him live, you’ll probably leave thinking about how wonderfully real he seems. Because, in short, that’s all he knows how to be. Even in the beginning, he said he’d learned his odd dance moves because everyone else, the professionals, already had their “thing”. So coming up with something different wasn’t to be revolutionary but to feel “comfortable”, which in itself could be considered a power move.
We laugh at his quirks, like when he covered Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ and launched into a strange voice for one of the iterations of “same as it ever was”. It’s funny because it’s so unexpected, and it’s unexpected because it’s so real, something you’d do in everyday life, something you wouldn’t necessarily expect of a legendary musician before a live audience. While it would take a long time to go into all the details of this, of why Byrne became so iconic just by being his awkward self, one of the primary components isn’t his mannerisms but his image.
Specifically, his ridiculously massive suit, something akin to Michael Jackson’s white-socks-and-loafer combination. But Byrne’s ginormous suit wasn’t just a fashion staple; it symbolised the off-kilter feel of Talking Heads and how, even in his weirdly jittery frontman state, he commanded attention. Inspired by Japanese Kabuki theatre, the big suit took from its principles of exaggerating the physical body onstage in both an endearing and uncanny way.
He didn’t want it to look like a cheap gimmick or that he was making himself look like something he wasn’t, and he only had one requirement, thus. Appearing on Wired’s ‘Most Searched Questions’, Byrne explained, “It was important to me that the big suit didn’t look like a fat suit, but that it looked more like a playing card. Kind of flat but wide and rectangular”.
His vision pulled from Alice in Wonderland‘s guards of the Red Queen paid off and became one of his most defining features, if not a little underappreciated. We see it everywhere when we go looking, but, really, shouldn’t such brave eccentricity be celebrated by name just a little bit more?
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