The future has often been a focus for David Byrne, even in his formative years when he was fronting Talking Heads. In one particular lyric from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ (1988) he envisages it as an idyllic Eden. He laments the passing of 7-Elevens, as flowers and cornfields have replaced shopping malls and parking lots (‘If this is paradise / I wish I had a lawnmower’). Byrne’s futurology, shared by his frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, always pushed him ahead of his contemporaries when it came to creating tomorrow’s music today. This pursuit of innovation persists now, even though Byrne is an elderly man in his seventies. Since quitting Talking Heads in 1991, Byrne has successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, put his name to dance scores, film soundtracks, musicals and books. Byrne’s most recent solo album, American Utopia, was released in 2018 and turned into a Broadway musical in 2019. It is now five decades on from Talking Heads playing ‘Psycho Killer’ at the CBGB club in New York. And it’s nearly four decades on from Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed 1984 film of Talking Heads in concert.

10 mins 23 secs read

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By the time he’d made it on to record and into the charts, Neil Tennant had lived many lives. As had many of those listeners who came on board with the debut album, Please, in 1986 and stayed interested in, if not always loyal to, the Pet Shop Boys canon. Much of this canon features in the forthcoming Pet Shop Boys collection, Smash, which covers the duo’s career by way of 55 singles recorded between 1985 and 2020. Beginning with ‘West End Girls’, released the month PC Keith Blakelock was savagely murdered during the Broadwater Farm riots, Smash concludes with a song about a boy who won’t leave home, during the peak of the Covid pandemic. If a Pet Shop Boys line wasn’t on our lips or on our minds, it was out there somewhere as the world changed – as our world changed when love, loss and death punctuated the odd party, club night or wake.

12 mins 28 secs read

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Just as Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and Eno’s life in shirts, some of us can say the same of Sparks songs. As Edgar Wright maintains, for those of a certain sensibility, these songs “invaded” their lives. Morrissey championed Sparks in a letter to the music press as an adolescent teen. A decade ago I interviewed Boy George, and he made the point that Sparks have even influenced those who are unaware of the original source of the influence. Born in the same era, the two of us found ourselves citing examples, listing the songs that had invaded our lives. For me, a key lyric is in the 1974 single “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” from Propaganda. Here’s why: I first met the brothers in London in the early-1990s, between their lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to bring their musical version of the Manga Mai The Psychic Girl to the screen, under the aegis of Tim Burton, and their beginning work on the underrated album Gratuitous Sax, Senseless Violins.

5 mins 0 secs read

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Michel Houellebecq brought me to Bertrand Burgalat. The enfant terrible of French literature, who’s been described as a racist, a pornographer, a misogynist, an Islamophobe – his novel Submission envisages a Muslim government ruling France by Islamic law in 2022 – is also a chanteur let’s not forget. The lyrics for his album Présence Humaine (2000) are culled from his poetry, and rendered in that half-speaking, half-singing style that’s at its best in the French language and – ideally Parisian – accent, of which Serge Gainsbourg was the master. Beyond the guitars and the guttural Gallic monotone of the title track, what lingered were motifs reminiscent of theme tunes in TV detective series from the 1960s or breezy art house films. This is the work of the composer and producer Bertrand Burgalat; he has numerous French film soundtracks to his credit, alongside collaborations with Nick Cave, Pulp and the writer Jonathan Coe. Not only is he himself a recording artiste, as they were once called, but according to the British author “a very brilliant one”. He’s right. One critic described his early works as “ear candy created with so much care that it starts to resemble high art.”

5 mins 47 secs read

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When Lana Del Rey first hinted at a foray into poetry via cryptic Instagram posts my mind went to a line from her last album Norman Fucking Rockwell: 'Your poetry's bad and you blame the news’. One year on she’s about to release an audio book of 14 poems set to music with the printed volume to follow in September: Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. The title conjures up Fitzgerald’s short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair and more obscurely the ethereal Eighties pop of Virginia Astley, love songs to the English countryside. California is Del Rey’s playground; Los Angeles is her town. The setting has been the backdrop throughout five successful albums and is central to the opening poem ‘LA Who Am I To Love You?'The actor James Franco has said her music reminds him of everything he loves about that city: 'I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and bikers.’

5 mins 16 seconds read

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