David Byrne

‘Welcome home Davey!’ roars someone in the crowd after opener ‘Heaven’, and it is a homecoming of sorts for an artist obsessed with the idea of belonging. David Byrne was born in nearby Dumbarton and although he never lived in Scotland long enough to call it home, the crowd clearly see him as a local lad finally coming back to his roots.

After a pared back start, the stage fills for a joyous ‘Everybody Laughs’. The impressive staging is similar to his last tour, American Utopia: a sizable band with their instruments strapped to them, everyone tripling-up as dancers and backing vocalists, always in constant motion playing percussion, xylophone, keyboard, saxophone and even an electric cello. The differences this time are ceiling-height wraparound LED screens and an LED-covered floor, ensuring we are fully immersed in the offbeat scenes they create.

The intensity of the visuals and the amount of movement on stage is completely overwhelming at first. We begin on the moon for ‘Heaven’, drift through a teenage acid trip for ‘And She Was’ and watch a discount store fade into cornfields during ‘(Nothing but) Flowers’. A collaboration with Brian Eno, ‘Strange Overtones’ takes us to David Byrne’s (adopted?) home city of New York, a tale of fleeting connections with neighbours through walls and windows.

Talking Heads’ ‘Houses in Motion’ is the highlight of the first half-hour and, for me, the entire show. A disquieting song that I never expected to hear in person is brought to awkward life by Kely Cristina Pinheiro’s rubbery bass. It ends with keyboardist Daniel Mintseris delivering a brain-melting solo while spinning on the spot, the center of a dizzying red vortex.

From new album Who Is The Sky?, ‘What Is The Reason For It?’ is catchy enough, but the visuals are necessary to help to carry some of the weaker songs. ‘My Apartment Is My Friend’ is far from his strongest solo work, but we get a 360° tour of Byrne’s apartment with the band in charming miniature on his living room rug.

A tender rendition of ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ is the first to get the crowd up on their feet. Onstage, half the band play while the other half slowly and awkwardly embrace them. The perfect embodiment of what love means to a man constantly out of place — never even sure if he’s home — questioning everything to try and make sense of it. Who is it? Where does that highway lead to? Nothing is better than this… is it?

A run of ‘Psycho Killer’, ‘Life During Wartime’ and a transcendent ‘Once In A Lifetime’ is as good as you’re likely to see on any stage, from any artist. If those were three of 12 songs, I’d have been happy, but the setlist is a massive 21 songs over two hours. He might not be running laps anymore but 73 year-old Byrne is never off the stage and the music only stops for some brief chats with the crowd. It doesn’t sound like he stops offstage either - he shows us some offbeat photos from his walks round Glasgow, including one of Overtoun House, a former maternity hospital in Dumbarton. Although they seem a distant memory now, COVID lockdowns clearly had a big impact on him, stuck at home alone, as he mentions them as the inspiration for several songs.

‘Life During Wartime’ feels like the lynchpin of this show. During it, we see videos of heavily-armed ICE agents chasing after one man on a bike for shouting ‘FUCK TRUMP’, widespread protests against those same agents and the brutal crackdown of those opposing the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The paranoid narrator of Talking Heads’ 1979 album Fear of Music saw modern life as perpetual conflict, and maybe he wasn’t wrong to be worried about cities, animals and paper. We’re flung above the clouds for ‘Air’, it might be cleaner up here.

But worry alone gets us nowhere. In American Utopia, Byrne encouraged us to vote to alleviate this — here he showed us that we need to take to the streets if we truly want to make a difference. We can’t communicate solely through the well-meaning slogans shown during recent Eno-collaboration ‘T Shirt’. At one point, Byrne talks about compassion as resistance. We need to awkwardly embrace and protect each other, in whatever place we call home.

The show manages to unite the twitchy paranoia of Talking Heads (‘Slippery People’) with the exuberant — and sometimes naive — optimism of his solo work (‘Like Humans Do’). We need to wear both, like Byrne and the band do, alternating between dark blue and bright orange suits each night of the tour.

The encore opens with a new arrangement of ‘Everyone’s Coming To My House’. It flips the album’s reluctant host into a welcoming one, inviting us to stay forever, to dance and collaborate. A frenzied ‘Burning Down The House’ closes the show, a huge outpouring of energy and tension. He’s not wrong to warn us to ‘hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather’ but the collective abandon of the band and audience show us how we can make a better world, despite everything.

Unlikely street radical David Byrne has taught us, well, that’s how we get there.