What David Byrne wants from Imelda Marcos

A week before I’m scheduled to meet David Byrne, I meet David Byrne. I’m on the floor of his Broadway musical. It’s during preview week, and he’s wearing all white, as is the David Byrne Way, and he’s scribbling notes. His show is, also in the David Byrne Way, unlike a traditional Broadway show. Half the seats are stripped out of the theatre and the audience is in a pit, below the stage.

The show has put us to work: sometimes we’re dancers, sometimes we’re protesters, sometimes we’re mourners at a funeral. As I follow the choreography, I occasionally bump into the person behind me and sometimes it’s Byrne. Other times, I look up, and he’s gone.

Days before I’m scheduled to meet Byrne, I tell friends. Many of them have stories of seeing him around New York like a mythical creature. Like Fran Lebowitz grumbling at tourists or Spike Lee courtside. One friend tells me that he stood next to him at a concert once and thanked him for his work. Hours later, Byrne reappeared next to him outside, unlocked his white bike, said, “Nice to meet you, CJ” and rode off into the night.

The day I officially meet Byrne I’m sitting across from him in the FT’s New York podcast studio. He’s in a white linen shirt with a shock of white hair. His head sort of bobbles above his body, and his round eyes look at me, unblinking. It’s not until I actually have to address him that I realise his name is actually . . . David. It feels weird in my mouth. David! Not a myth. Just another David.

Byrne is one of the few artists who has influenced American culture over decades, without ever getting stuck in one. I’ve always felt like he’s figured something out about creative output that most people miss. I spend most of our conversation trying to get him to explain it to me. “What are you doing?” I keep asking him. He says: “You just move the same thing into a different context, and people see it in a different way,” and I think that’s probably it.

If you’ve been in America, at a wedding, a pharmacy or a dive bar in the past week, you’ve probably heard Byrne’s voice. As the Talking Heads frontman, he wrote the lyrics to “Burning Down the House” and “This Must Be the Place”. The first song he ever wrote, to see if he could, was “Psycho Killer”. That song has a bunch of funny sounds like, “oh oh oh ohhhh, ayAYAYAYAY!” and that’s another thing Byrne is known for: funny sounds. When we talk, I tell him my colleague watched Talking Heads’ seminal 1984 concert documentary Stop Making Sense every day of the pandemic and Byrne cries, “Oh my goodness!” When he remembers something funny, he lets out a fat “Hah!”

Byrne is known for being socially awkward, for having an endearing curiosity and for always working in a new medium “to keep myself off balance”. He has collaborated with Brian Eno, the late Tejano singer Selena and dancer Twyla Tharp, written a book of tree diagrams, turned a defunct Manhattan ferry terminal into a playable musical instrument and performed at the Royal Albert Hall in a tutu.

All his work puts things in different contexts. Take his current project, Here Lies Love. You think you’re entering a normal Broadway show, and you end up an actor in a karaoke disco musical about a brutal dictator’s wife.

The show is about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, and I ask him why. He says he remembers her partying in the 1970s, going to Studio 54. “She was this glamorous, larger-than-life, flamboyant creature who sometimes made crazy pronouncements, and was the wife of a dictator. That was my perception.” Then one night about 15 years ago, he saw a video of her dancing with the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi under a disco ball in her New York townhouse. He was curious about her dark side. He did research. He started writing songs. He decided to set it in a disco club and cold-emailed the British DJ Fatboy Slim, because Fatboy Slim knows dance music, so . . . naturally. And a disco musical about Imelda Marcos was born.

It took Byrne five years to get it made and 10 more to get it to Broadway, mostly because who wants to touch a disco musical about a brutal dictator’s wife? As he puts it, “That is where I sometimes get in trouble.” Some reviews say the show glazes over too many details and makes Imelda a little too sympathetic. But he insists that’s the point. The Filipino people were betrayed by their leaders, and he wants us to feel that betrayal.

He realised in creating the show that he’d written a story that was flipped. Normally in theatre, the audience watches a character change. In this show, they change. “The audience has an insight at some point during the show and realises that what they thought was real is not real,” he says. “You have to have been seduced. You have to have kind of fallen in love with these people for it to hurt.”

Stop Making Sense flips the context, too. This month it will be re-released in America, remastered by the indie studio A24. The film purports to be a simple live recorded show, but by the end Byrne’s wearing a giant suit and you’re dancing in your living room, not sure when you stood up. In that show, he built a visual narrative: it starts with him alone onstage, then elements of the band are introduced one at a time until it hits a climax. “So you have this whole arc of the thing being created in a very transparent way right in front of you.” He also built up the character of himself, the frontman, who starts off “very odd and very alienated”. You watch him find and revel in joy organically. And you, in turn, revel with him.

Byrne just rewatched the show for the first time in about 10 years, and when I ask him what it’s like he lets out a big “Hah!”. “I’m looking at this guy, and he seems like a stranger! And I go, ‘Who is that strange guy? This is a very clever show he put together. But as a person, he looks pretty odd.’” He pauses. “I thought, that’s a very different person than who I am now.”

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An hour in, I finally persuade the man who is seemingly interested in everything to admit he has limits. He says he’s accepted some things just aren’t for him. “I only have one life. I’m not going to spend it trying to decipher something I’m not connected with.” He gets teased about one of them often: “I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare.” While we’re admitting things, I tell him I struggle with opera. He says he dabbled once in turning arias into pop songs, but he finds the operatic voice tough, too. We go on a long tangent about how young people would be more creative if they were taught contemporary art they’re familiar with, versus the classics. Byrne wonders why we don’t teach kids poetry with hip-hop storytelling. I lament that I wasn’t taught piano with Billy Joel’s “Vienna”.

“Exactly!” Byrne says.

I ask him when he’s creatively most fulfilled.

“I feel creatively fulfilled when something I’ve done surprises me,” he says. “When I ask myself, ‘Where did that come from? How did I come up with that?’ And I don’t know. That’s very fulfilling. When it’s a little bit of a mystery about why that thing came into being.”

We say goodbye and, as he’s walking out, I ask for a photo, for proof he exists and this happened. I pull my phone up. He peers into the camera, like it’s a curious new invention, and I snap. Then he disappears, into the street. I sit there for a while thinking about how to write this story, certain I’ll see David Byrne again.

Listen to part of Lilah’s conversation with Byrne on the FT Weekend podcast at ft.com/ftweekendpodcast

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