“If there was a song Spike Lee loved, we’d see him pop up in the aisle”: David Byrne on his concert doc American Utopia

▶︎ David Byrne’s American Utopia is available on digital platforms from 14 December 2020 and on Blu-ray and DVD from 11 January 2021.

Thirty-six years after Talking Heads and director Jonathan Demme changed the idea of what a live concert film could be, with the kinetic Stop Making Sense (1984), the band’s former frontman and elder statesman of alternative rock, David Byrne, is back to do it all over again.

This time Spike Lee is in the director’s chair, capturing the acclaimed Broadway stage show of Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. In a captivating blast of positivity and creativity, Byrne and his 11-strong barefoot backing band race through 100 minutes of deftly choreographed set pieces, mixing Talking Heads classics – Road to Nowhere, This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody), Once in a Lifetime – with Byrne’s solo work.

Though filmed in late 2019, the show’s themes are prescient: the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of US police and an impending election loom large – but so does hope for change.

We’ve never really worked together, but we’ve crossed paths a lot – so it was easy, I had his phone number! Also, because of a lot of the issues that are brought up in the show, I thought, ‘He’s gonna get this.’

It would have been in the 80s. In a sense we were coming up together on parallel paths, me in music, him in film and somehow I got invited to the premiere of Do the Right Thing… this was a really huge step in filmmaking; in the visual approach and the way he’s talking about issues. I felt that there was a lot of nuance in it. It wasn’t just a clear-cut didactic sermon.

We’ve gone on bike rides together. He goes around Central Park; that’s kind of his go-to thing, so we meet up and do that.

In the basement of the theatre there were a bunch of monitors set up so he could see what all the cameras were getting. He’d be down there with the editor and then if there was a song he loved, we’d see him suddenly pop up in the aisle.

Like Stop Making Sense, I think it has an arc. There’s a beginning and a middle and an end. The lead character, that would be me, or whoever I’m playing, goes on a journey. You start in one place and you end up somewhere quite quite different. I realised that this show, like that one, is not simply us just performing a series of songs, ending with our biggest hit. It’s really constructed to take the audience somewhere.

Absolutely. Some of them were just really practical – if you put too much light on the audience, rather than capturing their Broadway babies: David Byrne and Spike Lee excitement, they’ll clam up. Suddenly they’ll stop dancing. That happened on one of the nights we were filming Stop Making Sense and I realised: ‘OK, never do that again.’

It’d be easy to get depressed about it, and say, ‘Why do we have to keep saying this over and over and over again.’ But since George Floyd and the demonstrations, I think there’s more of an awareness of injustices. It’s something people talk about and acknowledge more than they used to. So, knock on wood, that might lead to action.

Exactly. There’s a lot of voter suppression and chicanery in this country, but if that can happen, I think we have a chance of people being heard and the concerns that they have being dealt with more than they have recently.

I’m determined to be non-partisan about it. I never want to tell people how to think, but I want you to participate.

Composer: Michel Legrand

“Everybody’s singing all the time, describing very mundane situations and actions. So rather than the typical Hollywood or Broadway thing where everyone comes together for a big musical number, the music is really woven in in a different way.”

Composer: Various

“I watched a documentary the other day on 2001 – of course, [Kubrick] just picked things that existed, but now it’s impossible to think of those scenes without that music.”

Composer: Jack Nitzsche

“There’s this beautiful theme – and it’s by a keyboard player and arranger who worked with The Rolling Stones and all these other groups. There was a musical saw that played the complete melody in one of the themes and the quavering sound was kind of perfect for the mental institution.”

Composer: Bill Lee

“That had a great score – and used some pop songs too. At that point Spike was working with his dad [double-bass player Bill Lee]. He used to play with all the folk musicians in the 1960s but when Dylan had them all go electric, he refused and said, ‘No, this is my sound.’”

Composer: Mica Levi

“Mica’s a young musician who’s done some really, really interesting scoring. It’s all about the mood and creating a very unsettling mood with sounds that you can’t readily identify. It’s not like, ‘Oh, here’s an orchestra or here’s a tinkling piano’ – you don’t know what it is. It’s very ominous.”