David Byrne

David Byrne0:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter0:48

My castaway this week is the musician David Byrne. Talking Heads was his band through the 70s and 80s. It occupied a central but skew-whiff position in pop culture, dislocated, witty, ambiguous, and twitching. Taking new wave existential angst and fashioning it into catchy chart-toppers, Psycho Killer, Road to Nowhere, and Burning Down the House are just a few of the band's best-known hits. But, unlike so many of his contemporaries, his was not a talent that could easily be wrung out by the music business and left for dead. In the ensuing decades, his work, scoring movies, writing books, staging art installations, and most recently, collaborating with neuroscientists, points to a man with significant creative reach. A beguilingly unconventional presence, he has nonetheless captivated the establishment, collecting an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy along the way. He says,

Presenter1:40

For my whole life I have attempted to make works that hover in the zone between the high and the low, the known and the unknown, the quotidian and the extraordinary. I love to make art that doesn't announce itself as art, and that, of course, includes pop music. So welcome.

David Byrne1:55

Thank you. It's a lovely island. I'm very happy that this massive sound system washed up on the beach.

Presenter2:01

On the beach. It's very lucky. You've been you've been making sound and many other things for run about forty years now. Are you one of those people, having spent so much time in music, working in music, where when you listen you inevitably listen with a highly tuned professional ear? Or can you ever lose yourself in music?

David Byrne2:19

Oh, I totally lose myself in music. Just now when we were kind of checking out some of these tracks, I was kind of moving and singing along. But I also at the same time listen with a slightly analytical ear the way a professional musician would do. And you you're listening to the way the song is constructed or the the arrangement or the approach that the vocalist is taking all those sort of things and you're going Hmm, hmm, listen to that.

Presenter2:45

When it comes to asking anybody to compile a list of eight discs they couldn't leave without, I mean it's a cheeky thing to do as a premise, but I think to ask a musician to do it is almost outrageous. What was your premise for picking your eight today? What did you want them to illustrate with?

David Byrne2:59

I picked things that are kind of little stepping stones in my life, my life in music. Things that I heard as a child, things that influenced my musical decisions, my musical awareness. So it's these are not current favorites. These are things that kind of take me back to my childhood and then almost up to present day.

Presenter3:16

Yeah.

Presenter3:22

Tell me about your first choice then, David Byrne. What what is this and why is it on your list?

David Byrne3:26

First one is fairly present day. This is Halsey. It's her song Bad at Love. And she gave a memorable speech at the Women's March.

Presenter3:36

Yeah, so in January of this year.

David Byrne3:38

Yeah. Really amazing speech. And you listen to the song. It's a good song and you realize she's got something to say in the song as well. She's very aware, very conscious. It's a pop song, but it really does have something to say. And you thought, okay, this is this is worth cheering.

Speaker 13:54

Boy back home in Michigan And it tastes like Jack when I'm kissing him So I told him that I never really liked his friends Now he's grown and he's calling me a bitch again There's a guy that lives in a garden state And he told me that we make it till we graduate So I told him that the music would be worth the wait But he wants me in the kitchen when it's in a play I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe that we meant to be

Speaker 14:14

But jealousy, jealousy, jealousy, jealousy get the best of me

Speaker 14:18

I don't mean to frustrate but I always make the same mistakes yeah always make the same mistakes cause

Speaker 14:25

Friday Love

Presenter4:28

That was halsey and bad in love. Um so, David Brown, your parents were from Glasgow. You spent the first three years of your life in Dumbarton and you made the journey, your family to North America. Can you describe your father and mother to me? First of all, your your dad.

David Byrne4:41

Uh okay. They were uh I would say or this I kind of figured this out later a mixed marriage. Dad's family was Cath Catholic, mum's family is sort of Protestant, Presbyterian, etcetera.

Presenter4:55

And a very big deal in in forties and fifties Glasgow, yes.

David Byrne4:57

What is it?

David Byrne4:58

Yes, yes. Yes, yes, which I didn't realize so much at the time. And I started asking them about it later, and I thought it might have had something to do with why they left. But dad had studied engineering in Glasgow, and Glasgow did not have a lot of work at that time. The shipyards were

Presenter5:00

So my

David Byrne5:14

little by little closing down, the steel, this and that. There's not a place where you could see a lot of future in that. So a lot of American companies, in this case Westinghouse, were reaching out and offering trained people like my dad.

David Byrne5:29

They were offering a job.

Presenter5:30

And so your parents had they'd come from relatively modest backgrounds, you know, that sort of educated working class background where betterment was part of the the journey.

David Byrne5:38

Exactly. That was it. They were working class, but looking back, I sense that they wanted economic betterment. And I think they probably wanted to be free of all the the kind of mixed marriage religious stuff. It was quite oppressive. Uh you had members of the family saying, You marry her, we're not talking to you anymore. Really? That sort of thing. And Jean just thought, Well, you know, they're a young couple trying to start a life. They have a kid. That was me. And they're probably thinking, Why do we need this ex

Presenter5:58

Could be like

Presenter6:08

Extra burden. Did they hold their Scottishness close to them once they they were in America, or did they sort of cut that loose as well?

David Byrne6:14

I would say we had s more or less Scottish food. Like this was in Canada at first. And r a lot of Scots emigrated to Canada. A lot of the food was just the normal thing, potatoes and stews and mince and

Presenter6:17

This is in Canada at first.

David Byrne6:27

All the good stuff.

Presenter6:31

In what way did they encourage Is your creativity as a kid?

David Byrne6:34

I would say by example. They played music around the house. Dad was an amateur painter. Things that you could say were influenced by, say, Matisse or Gauguin or this kind of thing. I have one at home now.

David Byrne6:51

The funny part was, being a Scot, if he found a nice frame, he would take a saw and cut off part of the picture to fit the frame.

Presenter7:00

Okay.

Presenter7:01

Did they speak with Scottish accents even when w they lived in America? Were they people who kept their accents?

David Byrne7:06

Yes.

Presenter7:06

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Byrne7:08

I had an accent as well, and but lost it when they moved to the United States. Funny, in Canada the ki other kids could understand me fine, but in Baltimore they c obviously couldn't understand me and a child of that age wants to f desperately to fit in, not stick out.

David Byrne7:25

My friends would say, what are your parents saying? We don't understand them.

David Byrne7:32

So

Presenter7:33

How many about your second David Burns? What are we gonna hear?

David Byrne7:34

So, I started thinking about the kind of music that was played around the house. This is the Rowan Tree, a Gene Redpath. I wouldn't say it was a great favorite of mine, but years later now I can look at some of the melodies I've written over the years and I go, oh, there's a real Celtic influence in some of the melodies I've done. They follow the same kind of melodic arc as this song.

Presenter8:02

Avantry Ramtree

David Byrne8:06

Uh

Presenter8:06

Those I believed in me.

Presenter8:11

Entwine thou uptwave ties for him and see

Speaker 18:16

A for you

Presenter8:21

Thy leaves o'er thy the first o' spring, thy flowers a summer

Presenter8:30

There was miserable than all the country sleep.

Presenter8:40

Rowantree, Jean Redpath. Um David Byrne, tell me about your home life. I'm interested in you know, your parents, as you say, kind of go ahead, slightly cutting free of their background. What was the chat around the dinner table?

David Byrne8:51

Uh sometimes politics came up at the dinner table. Dad was staunchly kind of left leaning. Sometimes he'd pontificate and quote George Bernard Shaw. And Mum she felt the same way, but was a more heartfelt, sentimental left leaner than Dad.

Presenter9:10

And she became in her later years a sort of peace activist. She became a key peace activist.

David Byrne9:13

She became a peace activist. She was also a teacher teaching uh mentally challenged kids in a public high school. And she got her degree and all that.

Presenter9:23

All that. One of the reasons I'm really interested in this is that so much of your music in the beginning dealt a lot with this kind of suburban dislocation, this idea that we are in our lives, but we are other people than we are representing ourselves as. And you have said, my parents fostered a little bit of a view of us as outsiders. So, this sense in which you were going through the motions, but there was other stuff as well. Does that sound.

David Byrne9:47

Yes, yes, it does. There wasn't uh it wasn't a lot of conscious reminding us. It wasn't them constantly saying we're different than those others. But it was you couldn't avoid it. People around us in the States, they ate with just a fork.

Presenter9:56

Yeah.

Presenter9:59

Sure.

David Byrne10:07

They would cut their food and then put the knife aside and then gather it up with just their fork. And I thought, that seems really inefficient.

David Byrne10:14

They still

Presenter10:15

Please jump.

David Byrne10:15

They still do that. So just as a child you realize that we eat with a knife and fork. We're different than our neighbors. And if I could say so, I think our way's better.

Speaker 110:25

Uh

Presenter10:25

Yeah.

Presenter10:30

Kate tell me about the reel to reel tape machine that your father adapted for you.

David Byrne10:35

Dad being an engineer, he was able to do things with electronics. And at some point, I remember he had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and it came with a microphone. And so, when I got to be an adolescent, I was learning guitar and was playing with it a lot. Dad acknowledged my interest, and he modified the tape recorder so that you could record what's called sound-on-sound. And it's a kind of multi-track recording.

Presenter11:07

Right.

David Byrne11:07

So that you can put down a guitar track and then play that and sing along with it and then add something else and add something else and add something else. And I would do things like cut up tapes and scramble them and put them back together again. I did these multi-track things with loads and loads of feedback and you know all sorts of things.

Presenter11:27

Did it delight you at the time?

David Byrne11:29

Oh yeah, absolutely totally exciting.

Presenter11:31

It's time now for some more music. David Brown, what have we got next?

David Byrne11:35

This goes back to politics in a way. Another folk song, but this is Woody Guthrie singing Do Ray Me. It has elements of, yeah, intentionally kind of elements of being like a children's song, but it's actually about, yeah, you think you're going to do fine if you okies are heading for California, but if you don't have the money, you're not going to make it.

Presenter11:57

Lots of folks back east they say is leaving home every day Feeding the hot old dusty way to the California line

Presenter12:06

Across the desert sands they roll, Gettin' out of that old dust bowl

Speaker 112:10

They think they're going to a sugar bowl, but here's what they

Presenter12:12

They find the

Presenter12:15

Now the police at the port of in crisis

Presenter12:19

You're number fourteen thousand per ninety

David Byrne12:21

Day oh if you ain't got the Doray me for soon.

Presenter12:28

You ain't got

David Byrne12:28

The dog ray me.

Presenter12:31

That was Woody Guthrie and Dora Me. David Byrne, were you a shy child? I was very shy.

David Byrne12:35

My child.

David Byrne12:37

I've heard from friends some of my shy behavior was quite extreme. I would have a party at my house and then I would go and hide. Someone would find me in a bedroom. Or I'd go to dinner at someone else's house and kind of sit on the side and not say anything the whole time. And I would often latch on to a friend who was more sociable than I was. So I could tag along and they would be the one that would do all the socializing, but I could be there. And my wife at the time, later on, was much more sociable than I was, which was maybe not the best kind of relationship, you know, balance in the relationship, but I gradually changed. But.

Presenter13:12

Yeah.

Speaker 113:21

Relationship.

David Byrne13:25

A lot of people asked me, well, if you were so shy, how could you possibly get on stage? Well, of course, that was what I was just about to ask you.

David Byrne13:32

And to me, it seemed self-evident. It seemed like, well, if you're really shy, you have to get on stage because that's the only way you can make your presence felt, or make your ideas known, or announce the fact of your existence. You can do that because it's an artificial situation, and then you can retreat back into your shell right after.

David Byrne13:54

Yeah.

Presenter13:54

So that's what I did. So when did you first want to perform? When did you first get up on stage?

David Byrne14:01

I was in high school. I would perform at the college and other coffee shops and folk places. I would play guitar, I'd play ukulele or violin or whatever, and sing.

Presenter14:01

But it's not.

Presenter14:13

Is it true that you were thrown out of the school choir?

David Byrne14:16

Well, not exactly thrown out, but told that probably I shouldn't continue.

Presenter14:21

Wait why?

David Byrne14:21

Well

David Byrne14:23

If you've heard my singing on some of the Early Talking Heads records...

David Byrne14:28

I very much enjoy that. Yes. And I can only imagine that it might have been more so back then. Although somehow I must have been able to kind of manage to sing in a normal way when I was singing in these coffee shops and singing these songs and accompanying myself.

Presenter14:52

Tell me then about your fourth one of the day. What are we going to hear now? Why is it on the list?

David Byrne14:55

Okay, we're jumping ahead. It's a little bit later. I'm not a child anymore. And I had a transistor radio. Terrible sound, but you could listen to it in your bedroom, either put it under your pillow so the parents couldn't hear it. So I remember hearing this song performed by the birds. I didn't know at the time that it was a Bob Dylan song. And this was a pop hit. And from the very beginning, from the opening sound, I thought, wow, this is really different. The sound was like nothing else I'd heard. And that and other things that I was hearing kind of tells you as a kid in the suburbs that there's another world out there. There's things being made that are made for us, whoever us is, and I have to go and find them.

Presenter15:44

Hey Mr. Tammery Man, play a song for me. One night's sleepy then, there ain't no place I'm going through.

Presenter16:00

They Mr. Tammy met Chris Company.

Presenter16:07

In

Speaker 116:08

A jingle jingle morning, how come far in

Presenter16:17

That was the Birds and Mr. Tambourine Man, and beautifully described David Byrne, that sort of moment of epiphany that so many of us recognize from our late teenage years. So you were beginning to explore performance and you were in a small band, and there were I've read, and I can I can't quite piece enough of this together for it to make sense, but I've read about a performance by this time you had a kind of long, straggly beard, I think. There was a performance where you shaved your beard off. Yeah. Can you explain what happened to me?

David Byrne16:38

Yeah.

David Byrne16:40

Yeah, I was making music with a friend at around this time. I was making visual art at the same time. And the school would show European films like Fellini films. So another world had opened up. And I decided, oh, we'll do a performance, and as part of it, I'll shave my beard off on stage, which is a little hard to do without a mirror. So there was a bit of blood. People cut themselves shaving. It doesn't hurt that much, but the blood can gush.

Presenter17:12

And it did. Yes, and it did. Do you believe, I wonder, in such a thing as pretentiousness, and do you think it has a role in creativity?

David Byrne17:20

Um

David Byrne17:21

Yes, it's given a bad rap. It gets a bad rap. It gets a bad rap. And I think if it's done in the right way, you can deal with big questions.

Presenter17:24

It gets a rap.

David Byrne17:31

And that's the best part of pretentiousness, is just feeling free to try something else.

Presenter17:36

And this freedom thing really does interest me with you because I think one of your attractions for people who've enjoyed your work is your ability to embrace your. I was going to say inner oddball, but sometimes not that much inner, sometimes very outer. You know, you're kind of doing that on our behalf, because most of us are not comfortable to do that. What does it feel like to do it?

David Byrne18:00

Yeah.

David Byrne18:02

It feels, sorry, my inner oddball, my outer eyeball. No, no, no, no, no, it's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. I'm most of the time completely unaware of it, although I'm aware that people sometimes find it amusing or strange. And I've gotten to the point now where I'm not intimidated by that, which is, I guess, a good thing. If I do something, I thought, well, that was fun. I'm not going to apologize for that. I remember once I was traveling in Iceland, and to go up by the glassiers, you had to have a driver in a special kind of car. And I was fiddling with my camera, and the camera would do things, you know, it would make little noises as you kind of adjusted the settings. And I would kind of mimic the noises. It would do something, and I would go, and I would be kind of just sitting there going,

Presenter18:05

Is that fine?

David Byrne18:53

The driver said to me, Do you always talk to your machines? To which the answer was.

Presenter19:04

Let's have some more music, David Byrne. Tell me about this. It's your fifth of the day. Ah, okay.

David Byrne19:06

But if I

David Byrne19:10

Yeah. So if the Mr Tambourine Man song was kind of an adolescent introduction to the kind of a world of pop music, that became kind of familiar. Whether it was The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or James Brown or The Temptations. Then later on

David Byrne19:28

In the probably early 70s, you start to encounter things that are really different than that, that are using that language, but are coming from a place that, again, you didn't know existed. And one of the groups that was doing that was the Stooges, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. To me, this music, it was an emotional, pure id outburst, but it was also very clever and consciously and creatively done. The name of the song is I Want to Be Your Dog, which, although there's nothing particular in the song that says this, you realize there's a hint of kind of another kind of sexual world that's being implied here. So that's another thing when you go, what's he talking about?

Speaker 120:19

Now I'm ready to close my eyes.

Speaker 120:27

Now I'm ready to close my mind.

Presenter20:35

And now I'm ready to feel your hand.

Presenter20:43

And lose my heart on the burning Sam.

Speaker 120:51

Now I wanna

Presenter20:52

Uh

Speaker 120:53

See your star.

Presenter20:55

How is the Stooges and I Want to Be Your Dog? You spoke going into that, David Byrne, about the idea that that new wave early 70s music was of course building on the traditions of the much more traditional stuff that had come before, like the birds and so on. I'm wondering, for those of us who were there, as it were, and heard Talking Heads music when it first came out, you know, it represented a high watermark in that new age music that was being produced in the early and mid-70s. In the beginning, what were your creative rules when you were writing and performing? You're Smiling Now.

David Byrne21:24

Yeah, I'm laughing about the idea of having rules, which we kind of did. Sometimes I think they were kind of unspoken, but they were there. We were not going to imitate rock and roll poses, singing styles, clothes. I wanted to use language that was not typical of pop music. There was no like long, noodly guitar solos. That was verboten. No posturing. Everything was going to be stripped down to the bottom. We were going to basically reinvent everything from scratch, which maybe was unnecessary, but we should dress like normal people. Of course, we didn't dress like normal people, so we had to appropriate something that sort of looked like normal people. At one point, living downtown, I sometimes would see the business people going to work and that, and I thought, well, I should wear a little suit. So I went down to the financial district and got myself a cheap suit. And I realized that in a club, it's just way too hot. And then I threw it in the wash.

Presenter22:30

And it shrunk down to nothing. But that was the little suit. What about the big suit? Of course, you know, from Jonathan Demi's landmark film in 1984, Stop Making Sense, it featured you.

David Byrne22:36

Glenn

Presenter22:40

Famously, and it's the man with the tiny head wearing the big suit.

David Byrne22:44

There's a there's a line Connecting those, there's an idea of the everyman in a suit, which I still do. But I went from trying to kind of camouflage myself as the everyman to making a kind of statement by kind of enlarging the suit to giant signs. The man is lost in his suit. And by that point, the band and I had little by little learned how to do things like have instrumental sections or dance on stage or do theatrical things in a way that we felt belonged to us.

Presenter23:01

Yeah.

Presenter23:18

It's reported that you split up am amid much acrimony, and that's not all that unusual in in the in the music business, but do you regret that it ended that way?

David Byrne23:26

Yes, I wish it didn't end the way it did, although I think musically we ended on a good note. But personally, yes, it was not done very cleanly or honestly yeah, a bit of a mess.

Presenter23:39

Were you difficult to work with?

David Byrne23:42

I can imagine I was. I think not so much now.

Presenter23:45

Oh no, because I was looking at photographs yesterday of you then and you look so relaxed now. In photographs from back then you'd look pretty angsty.

David Byrne23:45

Oh no, they're good

David Byrne23:52

Yeah, a little bit angsty and very very focused to the extent where it's like it must be done this way. I have a vision that has to be like this, which is maybe understandable when you're trying something new and you're not sure if other people get it. And it means the absolute world to you. It's your baby, it's your soul, it's everything you've dreamed of that you're putting together and you don't want it to be compromised. But now I've learned that you can work with people and sometimes get something in a way that's not so dictatorial.

Speaker 124:10

Yeah.

Presenter24:32

Let's have your sixth, David Byrne. What are we going to hear now?

David Byrne24:34

Okay, so we heard the Stooges. At the same time that the other Talking Heads and I, we listened to a lot of RB and dance music, disco, James Brown, and Parliament Funkadelic. Parliament Funkadelic was kind of the more outrageous theatrical, philosophical aspect of RB at that time. It made you realize that there's all sorts of possibilities that pop music, dance pop music, funk, it can talk about things in a way that's kind of sly and funny, but also saying something quite profound.

Speaker 125:10

Ready or tonight, yeah we come Getting down on the one which we've defeated

Presenter25:21

Can I get it on my side but Tom I can't sound

Speaker 125:33

Address.

Speaker 125:37

Ain't no tear my nap.

Presenter25:41

I was Funkadelic and One Nation under a groove. David Brown, you've written operas, you've written film scores, you publish books, you do photography, blog about cycling even. So much of your work, not just musically, but in exhibitions and in books, you know, you constantly pose questions for the viewer or the listener, the consumer of your work. But interestingly, you always seem to rather resist coming up with answers. I presume that's entirely deliberate.

David Byrne26:08

Yeah, it's entirely deliberate. I've been doing these this series of talks, and it's me sort of pointing to things that other people have done. So it's not me saying do this, but it's more saying, look, someone's done something, it seems to be working. Just saying, look what I found.

David Byrne26:27

But the songs that I write and a lot of the other things I do are more about asking the questions, asking what do we do, who are we, what kind of people are we, what kind of person am I? All that sort of thing.

Presenter26:39

And there we are. I wonder how much for this chronically shy teenager that we were talking about in kid. How are you with your fame now?

David Byrne26:46

It's mild. I get around New York on a bicycle. I do here too, but not today. Last night I had a bite to eat in a restaurant in Nottinghill with a friend, and a kid, he must have been like 18 or something, jumped out of the restaurant. He had an Eastern European accent and he wanted a selfie. I thought, well, I was incredibly flattered. I was incredibly flattered.

Presenter27:08

Have we flattered? Right? As well you should be for the attentions of a teenager. And tell me then about your sevenths. What are we going to hear now, David Byrne?

David Byrne27:16

Wow, okay. In the probably late 80s I started listening to a lot of Latin music and at one point I went bin diving in Rio and got this record by a guy named Tom Zay. There's elements of Brazil folkloric music and Brazilian pop music all mixed together in a way that to me said wow. So this is one where he got the instruments playing what in music would be called a hocket technique. where different musicians are playing different notes on different instruments. And then eventually Mr. Zay comes in playing some power tools.

Presenter27:53

Yeah.

Presenter28:33

That was Tong Zay and talk. You were laughing quite a lot, or at least smiling through that earlier.

David Byrne28:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean you can hear it goes from power tool to a typewriter, all sorts of things.

Presenter28:42

Ahead of its time.

David Byrne28:42

Time.

Presenter28:42

Tell me this, David Burnt. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

David Byrne28:46

Oh god, I don't know. Let's come back to that.

Presenter28:50

Okay,'cause I'm thinking about your role as a parent and I'm thinking about

David Byrne28:53

Yeah, that's what everybody would say. I know that's pretty, my greatest achievement is my daughter, which is true.

Presenter28:54

I know that's

David Byrne29:01

But you wouldn't want to say that. No, because every parent would say that. But if it's true. It's true. And it's also so mysterious and magical. You know, coming from me, she could have been such a mess.

Speaker 129:03

Yeah.

David Byrne29:14

But she's not. She's not a mess, and she's very happy. And what more could you want?

Presenter29:20

Nothing more than that. I mean, I love that you're honest enough to say that. I mean, obviously, she's grown up now. But when you were a parent, how did you get on with that? You know, there's a lot of very conventional elements to being a responsible parent. Oh, could you do it?

David Byrne29:32

Oh, could you do that? Yeah, I could do it. But there was a conflict. Probably no surprise. It was at some early on period where you're confronted with all the responsibilities of being a parent and pushing a pram around and things like that. I thought, oh, that's not me. I can't be pushing a pram around.

David Byrne29:53

But I did, but at the same time, it was kind of like, grip your teeth and push the pramp.

Presenter30:01

It's so good that you are very, very honest about that. So you you did pitch up and you did do those things, but you f if you felt like you were sort of betraying yourself by doing that.

David Byrne30:09

In a certain way, which is very silly.

Presenter30:11

That is very silly.

David Byrne30:11

That is very silly.

Presenter30:14

Um, what do you th you know, uh this is Desert Island Discs of course, so I'm going to cast you away to a desert island. How how will you be all by yourself on a tiny island with no one for company?

David Byrne30:24

Uh I'll probably go crazy after a while, but I think solitude is also very undervalued.

Presenter30:31

Do you need it in your life? Do you build it in your life? Absolutely, absolutely.

David Byrne30:32

Absolutely, absolutely.

Presenter30:34

B.

David Byrne30:34

I don't know.

David Byrne30:36

Not all the time, but there are plenty of times when I love just going out to a restaurant by myself, sitting at a counter with a book or reading on a tablet or whatever it might be. And I'm very happy doing that. But I'm aware that some people give me a look, like, oh, poor man, doesn't have any friends. Oh, God, look at that. At this point in his life, you'd think he'd have some friends.

Presenter31:02

Tell me, D David Byrne, about your final piece of music, then. What are we going to hear now?

David Byrne31:06

Okay, this is another obvious influence in kind of two different ways. It's a gospel song called Stand on the Word: The Joubert Singers, but it's mixed by Larry Levan. Larry Levan was one of the great DJs at Paradise Garage in early days of club music. And what's interesting is that gospel music, if you listen to the lyrics, it's yeah, it's like.

David Byrne31:32

Do what the Lord says, which is probably not the kind of ideas you would be putting forward in the Paradise Garage. But musically, it all fits.

Speaker 131:47

Got it.

Presenter31:51

We don't know how, we don't know when Should

Speaker 131:56

We suffer.

Speaker 132:00

Christian never

Presenter32:01

Uh

Speaker 132:01

Uh

Presenter32:02

And thanking God and justice world.

Presenter32:08

We don't know how, we don't know when To teach your step, only shall friends

Presenter32:19

That was G. Bart Singer's and Stand on the Word. It's time now, David, for me to give you the books. Every Costaway gets the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take one other book along. What's your book gonna be?

David Byrne32:31

It's really difficult. I'm just going to be very practical and take along the one I haven't finished reading yet, Oliver Sacks' new book, The River of Consciousness, I think it's called.

Presenter32:31

Yeah.

Presenter32:38

Okay.

Presenter32:40

Yeah.

David Byrne32:41

And I thought, well.

Presenter32:42

I want to finish it. Okay, that's a very reasonable thing to do, so we shall give you that book. Uh every castaway is allowed a luxury as well to make life more bearable.

David Byrne32:49

Yeah.

Presenter32:51

Uh Uh

David Byrne32:52

Could be

Presenter32:52

Cool.

David Byrne32:52

Cookbook or a set of cookbooks. In the last couple of months I've been discovering the uses of fish sauce used in a lot of Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese.

Presenter33:01

It's Nam Pla, right, isn't it? That fish is a little bit more. Yes, do you want that or do you want the books? You know, the cookies are. You can't have them both, can I? You can't have them both.

Speaker 133:03

Uh

David Byrne33:03

Yeah.

David Byrne33:05

Can't have them both, can I?

David Byrne33:07

But I'm on a desert island. I could catch some fish and I can

Presenter33:10

I can

David Byrne33:10

Mm

Presenter33:11

So some Vietnamese cookbooks. Yeah, that sounds good. Okay, let's give you those as your luxury. If I were to force you, and I'm about to do this, to pick just one of the eight discs to save, which one disc would be yours?

David Byrne33:14

Do you lose this year?

Presenter33:23

Ah

Presenter33:24

I'm gonna go with

David Byrne33:24

The one we just heard. Stand on the word. I was kind of moving and grooving to that as it was playing, and I thought, let's keep that rolling.

Presenter33:33

Okay, let's give you that. David Burns, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

David Byrne33:37

Thank you.

Presenter33:48

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find over 2,000 interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians, and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desertisland discs. And I have a favour to ask: if you could rate and review the Desert Island Discs podcast wherever you download your podcasts, it'll really help other people find us. Thanks again for listening.

David Byrne34:25

This is the BBC.

Speaker 234:30

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