DAVID BYRNE & RICHARD THOMPSON: AN UNLIKELY COMRADESHIP

Wherein a New Wave ignoramus puts his cluelessness on full display

The first four paragraphs of this piece are a radically shortened and edited version of a 1991 Musician magazine “Performance” column titled “Thompson Twins” (remember them?). When it was first published, my essay was almost entirely about a solo show by the great singer/songwriter/guitarist Richard Thompson on March 7, 1991. The venue was the Town Crier, a folk music club in Beacon, NY. Thompson had a special guest that night, who joined him for a five-song encore. In this new, extended version of the Musician piece, the special guest, David Byrne, receives much more attention than originally. All I’ll say is that I’ve learned a lot since I wrote so smarmily about an artist who was already a major force in American music. I hope I’ve set things to right.

“If the crush of music-bizzers,” I wrote near the start of the ‘91 piece, “was more appropriate to the Bottom Line than to an exurban folkie joint, it was because word had gotten out of an appearance by David Byrne, reportedly a big Thompson fan.

“Not a hard thing to be. Over the years, Thompson has deepened and sharpened his almost miraculous guitar playing. ‘I’m a better player harmonically than I was ten years ago,’ he told me when we chatted after the show. ‘I’ve got better ideas and I execute them better.’ He’s more personable onstage, too, having learned to turn his discomfiture between songs into a dry, very British drollery: pop music’s best stand-up routine, hands down.

“Thompson started his set with a new song about a 1952 Vincent motorcycle. Then we got the genre-defining breakup song ‘Shoot Out the Lights,’ Thompson’s solo a shimmering flurry of bent notes, harmonics, and blindingly swift hammer-ons. At the heart of Thompson’s virtuosity is his mastery of simultaneous flatpicking and fingerpicking, which he typically downplayed. ‘I never really thought about it. It came, really, from being lazy; I couldn’t be bothered to put the pick down.’

“And it was on to the latest Thompson dirge, the funny-as-a-crutch ‘God Loves a Drunk,’ and a John French song about the economic benefits, to a rock star, of being dead. Toying with the idea of doing ‘Monster Mash,’ Thompson thought better of it, and hit full stride with ‘Two Left Feet,’ ‘Wall of Death’ and ‘When the Spell is Broken,’ churning into a solo on ‘Valerie’ that got ever-fleeter, the room bursting into applause before Thompson was even back into the verse—almost a showstopper, but the show was over.”

OK, it’s authorial cringe time. “David Byrne’s cameo,” I wrote, “was a different-order phenomenon: not so much a matter of musical talent as a visitation of Big Pop Fame upon the little club, like seeing Jackie Onassis hailing a cab [I had originally tried out ‘like seeing Cher leaving a midtown restaurant’]. Taped for the English TV show “Rock Steady,” the Thompson/Byrne duet was a one-shot ‘stirred up by a mutual friend,’ Thompson said, ‘though I wouldn’t preclude doing some recordings with David.’ The latter sang off-key on the Texas Tornados’ ‘Who Were You Thinking Of?’ and ‘didn’t necessarily know’ (Thompson, charitably) Plastic Bertrand’s punk send-up ‘Ça plane pour moi.’” Byrne thus dispatched, the review ended after a few more sentences in praise of Richard Thompson.

All I can say is that professional music writers can be just as parochial as the next guy. I was never much into New Wave. I thought Elvis Costello’s first few albums were great and then got bored, as I did with Graham Parker and Nick Lowe. Blondie turned me on selectively. I had no use for Devo. The one exception to my indifference/ antipathy towards New Wave was Television. I was a roots-music guy, my heroes Ry Cooder and Merle Haggard. I was into blues singers country and urban: the Johnsons (Robert, Tommy and Blind Willie) and Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. I loved the then-recently deceased Stevie Ray Vaughan. Oh—I was a jazz snob, too.

Suffice it to say that I was, of course, dead wrong about David Byrne. It took me a long time to realize that in the songs that he co-wrote and sang with Talking Heads—"Psycho Killer,” “Burning Down the House,” “Life During Wartime,” and especially as the literally shape-shifting ringleader in Jonathan Demme’s concert film Stop Making Sense—Byrne proved himself, the critic Dan Chiasson wrote, “as, from the beginning, one of the most gripping and passionate talents in American music. He not only sang the songs but acted as their protagonist, the eager yet perpetually thwarted student of modern life, straining to master its arcane orders and customs.” (He also turned himself into an adept rhythm, and sometimes lead, guitarist, if not on Richard Thompson’s level—who is?) Byrne was and is an endlessly questing artist on multiple fronts. Thompson is a musician, if a great one. Suffice it to say that by 1991, when he broke up Talking Heads to pursue a broad range of projects, musical and beyond, Byrne had already had a much greater impact on contemporary music and culture than Thompson, for all the latter’s brilliance. Shame on me for the blinders I so smugly wore.

The pair’s mutual regard was genuine. “I’m kind of in awe of his guitar playing and writing,” said Byrne in a 1992 interview. Thompson’s gifts, Byrne pointed out, were always in the service of the song. “It’s not just that he’s good at doing flash things on the guitar.” Thompson, for his part, said that “David Byrne has always been on my short list of people it would be interesting to work with.”

The brief onstage meeting at The Towne Crier was, in effect, a test drive for a more substantial joint performance on March 24, 1992 at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, a popular ‘90s venue for off-center music (such as the Garth Hudson concert that I revisited in my Substack of June 19, 2024). Thompson and Byrne each played a generous solo set, and reappeared together for a madcap four-song encore: Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”; the Tornados’ “Who Were You Thinking Of”, onto which Byrne and Thompson delightfully tacked ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears”; Ewan MacColl’s folk classic “Dirty Old Town,” and finally a rousing “Psycho Killer.” The concert was recorded as An Acoustic Evening with David Byrne and Richard Thompson, a 29-song double album. Most of the master found its way into the clutches of a now-defunct Italian bootleg label, Red Phantom Records. Only one song, “Psycho Killer,” has made it onto video. So sit back and enjoy a duo who put their very different strengths to good use.