By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | With his Studio 54-inspired Broadway musical coinciding with the anniversary of Talking Heads’ landmark concert film, Byrne looks back on a time when “there was an intersection with rock and dance and hip-hop. … That felt right.”
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around,” David Byrne once proclaimed in Talking Heads’ apocalyptic punk/funk classic “Life During Wartime,” which namechecked the New York night spots Mudd Club and CBGB and was one of the standout herky-jerky/quirky musical numbers of the Heads’ groundbreaking concert film, Stop Making Sense. And now, four decades later, it’s all come full-circle for Byrne, in the most dance-tastic way.
Just as Stop Making Sense gets the deluxe 4K re-release treatment next month (with Byrne set to reunite for the first time since 2002 with estranged bandmates Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison for a Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11), Byrne is bringing dystopian disco to New York’s Broadway scene with the immersive musical Here Lies Love. The musical, written with superstar DJ Fatboy Slim and exploring the Evita-like rise and fall and decadent life of Imelda Marcos, was inspired by another legendary late-‘70s NYC club, Studio 54. And much like “Life During Wartime,” it mixes politics and partying.
“When I read that Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, loved going to discos, and that she went to Studio 54 and a whole bunch of others, and that she had a mirrorball installed in her New York townhouse. … I thought, ‘Oh, here’s somebody who lives in that world, and maybe there’s some kind of correlation. Maybe there’s some kind of metaphor for the kind of insular bubble world of s powerful person like that — that kind of ecstatic, transcendent feeling that you get kind of on a dance floor,” Byrne tells Yahoo Entertainment. “So, I thought, ‘OK, I’ll start doing the research and see if there’s a story there that could be told this way.’”
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Watch Yahoo Entertainment’s extended David Byrne interview below, in which he discusses his the pioneering production behind Here Lies Love, the chances of it ever becoming a big-screen movie musical, and why its storyline resonates even more now than it did when he and Fatboy Slim began working on it in 2005.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/david-byrne-here-lies-love-stop-making-sense-armisen-202621076.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink
Photo: David Byrne | https://www.facebook.com/DBtodomundo/