Byrne on Ramones Spit, Lou Reed's Ice Cream Critique — SkimNews
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- David Byrne recounted the May 1977 UK tour with Ramones starting at Eric's Club in Liverpool, recalling audiences spitting at bands: "Ramones had leather jackets when they got spat on. We didn't!"
- Lou Reed invited Talking Heads to his apartment after seeing them at CBGB, ate two quarts of ice cream while critiquing their song "Tentative Decisions" by suggesting it be slowed to Velvet Underground speed, and told the young Byrne—whose hairy arms he called "ape-like"—to never wear short sleeves on stage.
- Brian Eno's production on Talking Heads records evolved from capturing the band's sound to "using the studio as an instrument" with improvisation; Byrne said Eno's oblique strategy cards were physically present in sessions but may never have actually been used.
- Byrne produced Fun Boy Three's "Our Lips Are Sealed"—originally co-written by Terry Hall with Jane Wiedlin for the Go-Go's—and their album Waiting, describing his role as a "cheerleader" who stepped back when he lacked constructive input.
- Byrne detailed his current tour's liberation of musicians from wires: a Hungarian company's self-powered MIDI keyboard rack, six percussionists replacing a single drummer, four drummers plus dancers on clarinets, and curved video screens placing performers on the moon or in New York streets.
- Byrne said his 1979 song "Life During Wartime" feels more relevant than ever, specifically citing "the ICE raids and all that" in the US.
- Byrne framed kindness as punk resistance, quoting John Cameron Mitchell: "Love and kindness are the most punk things you can do right now."
Why it matters: Byrne's explicit invocation of current US ICE raids to explain why a 46-year-old Talking Heads song feels newly resonant is the sharpest political note in a career-spanning Q&A, while his technical breakdown of the current tour reframes his post-Talking-Heads project as an ongoing engineering experiment rather than nostalgia.
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