David Byrne is on tour promoting his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant And How They Wake Up. He was at Manchester's Stoller Hall on Wednesday night and my friend Darren asked me if I wanted to go. Darren's photo is the one above, much better than mine (below).
Byrne talked for an hour and a bit. In the book he explores how ideas and knowledge sometimes get lost or forgotten and filed away, only to be rediscovered years later (sometimes hundreds of years later). I've not read the book so can't provide any real detail on it but in it he outlines over thirty case studies, from heliocentrism to Caravaggio.
At the Stoller Hall he talks about five cases, three from the book and two that didn't make it. He begins with Roman concrete and its recipe (very long lasting) and contrasts it with modern concrete (not fit for purpose, prone to aging and collapsing) and then weaves in various other people and ideas that came and went and came back again; Botticelli and the hardcore moralistic Dominican friar Girolamo Savanarola, the pre- Raphaelites, Renaissance surgeons, cellular discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries and several other things I've forgotten before ending on the clitoris.
Byrne is witty, breezy, conversational- he says 'wow' a lot, the ideas and events he's talking about amazing himself. He has a PowerPoint with slides and labels. Dressed in charcoal overshirt and trousers and with his white sweptback hair he looks as much like a lecturer or academic as the frontman of one of the key bands of the 1970s and 80s. While he talks I often fond myself looking at the slides on the big screen and then looking back at him and thinking, 'Jesus Christ! That's David Byrne!'.
There was no Q&A, no questions from the floor, no point when you thought he might whip a song out- he spoke, engagingly, and then said, 'thank you for coming', waved, and left by the door at the side of the auditorium. His message at the end- be curious, be open to things, consider things that may feel counter intuitive, be prepared to change your mind.
From 1981's The Catherine Wheel, a soundtrack Byrne wrote for a Twyla Tharp dance project.
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