4. May 2014
David Byrne / Fatboy Slim ‘Here Lies Love’
By Walter Price
Remember that interesting concept album from the minds of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (Norman Cook) Here Lies Love (2010) centered around the life of Imelda “Iron Butterfly” Marcos and featuring voice appearances Steve Earle, Kate Pierson, Florence Welch, Tori Amos, Natalie Merchant, St. Vincent and about a dozen others?
Some of the highlights of Here Lies Love echo the records Imelda might have danced to at New York discothques a few decades earlier. “Ladies in Blue,” a tribute to the pill-popping entourage that surrounded the “Iron Butterfly,” as she was known, recalls the cooing stomp of ABBA; Kate Pierson of the B-52s belts “The Whole Man” as if it’s one of her own hits. “The text on that one is almost one hundred percent taken from one of Imelda’s wackier speeches,” Byrne says. “She got into her own kind of cosmology where binary code, zeroes and ones, would turn into flowers and trees and heart shapes, and she’d give these speeches and do drawings at the same time. She did one in front of the U.N. General Assembly; I can only imagine what they thought.” -Douglas Wolk (Time Magazine 2010)
Sadly, me neither. Which is extremely odd considering I have secretly prided myself on being a keen follower of all things Byrne. Ashamed, I am. Not really. But I do wish I would have had the chance to discover the project as the rest of the world did on release. Alas, better to be late to the party than to never have shown at all…
Enough with all that. I’m listening now.
There is also another Off-Broadway production of the double album and it looks to be headed to London as well opening October 2014 at the National Theatre. Good stuff. I no longer live in New York and London, well; I don’t currently live there either.
“We wanted it to continue, but because of the nature of the show — it’s a simulated danceclub disco and the performance goes on all around you — we can’t do it in a regular theater, So we looked and looked, and in the time since the last run, we didn’t find anything — almost but not quite. The Public generously said, ‘Come back into the place where you were. You can do a commercial run here, and we’ll make some kind of deal. We don’t want it to disappear for too long.'” – David Byrne (The Hollywood Reporter)
Sounds like a winner! I think I’ll just sit here and get deep into the much ballyhooed project, from one of my music heroes. A project that I never knew existed…It happens.
Here Lies Love: Website. / Facebook. / Twitter. // David Byrne. / Fatboy Slim.
Smile