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At the home of the Oscars, LA’s Dolby Theatre, the 73-year-old pulls off a dazzling, award-worthy production featuring Talking Heads classics, fresh material from this year’s ‘Who Is the Sky?’ and a celebrity cameo
Kevin E G Perryin Los AngelesFriday 21 November 2025 10:47 GMTComments
CloseDavid Byrne performs in San Francisco
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I wasn’t sure if I’d make it to see David Byrne tonight. My grandmother died this morning, half a world away. It turned into a day of high emotion spent remembering a woman who loved me and my siblings selflessly and unreservedly. Los Angeles seemed to know how I was feeling: the grey skies wept, turning the streets into rivers. At first I didn’t feel much like leaving the house, but when the evening came I was determined to set sail for Hollywood Boulevard. I am, after all, a professional, and perhaps someone “burning down the house” would take my mind off things.
Byrne turned out to be just what was needed: a life-affirming salve delivered in the form of an awe-inspiring spectacle. The 73-year-old has been experimenting with the art of stagecraft since Talking Heads first took the stage at CBGB, dressed like accountants, in 1975. Fifty years on, he’s promoting his new playful, occasionally goofy, solo record Who Is the Sky? It manages somehow to live up to the high bar set by Talking Heads’ groundbreaking Stop Making Sense tour in 1983 (immortalised in the concert film by Jonathan Demme) and his own acclaimed American Utopia run in 2018 (given similar treatment by Spike Lee). Byrne is a professional. The only unknown variable is the audience. About five minutes before the show starts, he makes an announcement to those in attendance that the venue owners have confirmed... it will be OK to dance.
The production for the Who is the Sky? tour in many ways picks up where American Utopia left off. Byrne is once again joined by a large backing group comprising five dancers and seven musicians, all of whom move freely around the stage in a routine by choreographer Steven Hoggett.
Some things, however, have been refined. The grey American Utopia uniforms have been replaced by rich blue suits designed by Veronica Leoni for Calvin Klein. There are vast, high-definition projections capable of transforming the stage in an instant. On opener “Heaven”, for example, Byrne and his band appear to be standing on the surface of the moon, with the Earth rising behind them. “There she is,” says Byrne, pointing to the blue planet. “Our heaven. The only one we have.”
This is the first of many times tonight that Byrne offers a welcome shift in perspective. On the jaunty “Everybody Laughs”, the first track from Who Is the Sky?, he finds magic in the universality of the human experience, while the projections throw us into the sort of surreal New York street scenes favoured by comedy documentarian John Wilson. Then Byrne takes us back to his childhood in Baltimore for 1985’s “And She Was”, inspired by the “blissed-out hippie chick” he met who lay in the grass near a Yoo-hoo factory while tripping on LSD.
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open image in galleryDavid Byrne onstage during his ‘Who Is the Sky?’ tour at New York's Radio City Music Hall on September 30, 2025 (Emilio Herce)Talking Heads fans are treated to a veritable greatest hits selection sprinkled through the set. “(Nothing But) Flowers” is followed by “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)”, getting the majority in the Dolby Theatre on their feet. This being LA, we get a brief celebrity cameo when former Saturday Night Live star Fred Armisen dons a blue jumpsuit and a portable drum kit for a fantastic, propulsive “Slippery People”.
Those crowd-pleasing favourites are interwoven with gems old and new from Byrne’s solo catalogue. The 2008 Brian Eno collaboration “Strange Overtones” could have been released this week, its lyrics about humanity overcoming technology bolstered by an irresistible bass hook courtesy of Kely Pinheiro. Another Eno collaboration, “T Shirt” (which actually was released this week) takes as its somewhat more unlikely subject matter the phenomenon of the slogan T shirt. Several choice examples are projected behind the band, with the audience cheering wildly for phrases such as “Make America Gay Again” and the Trump-ruffling “No Kings”.
Having spent so much of his career writing about alienation and paranoia, it’s no surprise Byrne has a fascinating take on the pandemic. In front of a projection of his real-life Manhattan apartment (floor-to-ceiling windows, shelves overflowing with books and records, no visible television) he presents both the optimism of solitude (“My Apartment Is My Friend”) and the grind of isolation (a cover of Paramore’s “Hard Times”).
open image in galleryDavid Byrne and his band performing in front of a screen reading 'Make America Gay Again' during the song ‘T Shirt’ (Emilio Herce)The main set concludes with another thrilling run of Talking Heads classics: “Psycho Killer” into “Life During Wartime” into “Once in a Lifetime”, by which point there isn’t a single person sitting down. “Life During Wartime” is brought vividly into the present moment with footage of anti-ICE protests, while “Once in a Lifetime” is a song that simply seems to accrue more meaning and power with every passing year. At the conclusion of this live version, the song bursts into a maelstrom of noise and strobe lighting as Byrne sings: “Time isn’t holding up/time isn’t after us… same as it ever was… letting the days go by…” Suddenly, grief is in my throat again.
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After a brief interlude, Byrne returns for his encore and explains that he’s going to play “Everybody’s Coming To My House”, from American Utopia, but using an arrangement he first heard put together by a choir from an Abyssinian Baptist Church. He performs it under a single bulb, with his band gathered around him, singing soulfully: “We’re only tourists in this life / Only tourists, but the view is nice.” There is death, the song says, but there is so much beauty too. When he closes with “Burning Down the House”, the theatre seems to sway like a ship on the ocean. Nobody needs to be reminded: it’s OK to dance.
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