Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense gig kicks off with a humbleness that’ll be familiar to any improviser: there’s a pair of feet, and they’re ambling their way on to an empty stage. There's your taste of showbiz, chief, deal with it. Okay, the stage here is massive, as is the crowd, who are actually cheering, and the feet happen to belong to art-funk god David Byrne, but still it’s all remarkably low-key: with a bare lightbulb above his head and the raw skeleton of theatre exposed behind him, Byrne plonks down his boom-box and introduces himself apologetically: ‘Hi, I’ve got a tape I want to play you.’ Given that the show was directed by Jonathan Demme, the guy behind Silence of the Lambs, you wonder what’s going on. Surely it’ll be more than a gawky bloke busking Psycho Killer, albeit expertly, while strumming along to a tape deck?
On track two, the ‘yes and’ kicks in: yes we’ll take Byrne and his guitar as a building block, and add Tina Weymouth on bass, fleshing out the sound for a low-key rendition of Heaven. On track three, the ‘yes and’ kicks it up another notch, when a team of black-clad ninja stagehands push on a platform carrying drummer Chris Frantz. Yes I may look like an art teacher, he says, but I’ll take that funk, and I’ll add some beats. By the time Jerry Harrison comes on with his rhythm guitar, bringing a new level of drive for Found A Job, the lights are low and the gig is starting to fire: entirely consistent with Byrne’s initial offer, but by now a very different beast, the product of patient, focused building.
Talking Heads only have four members. But this tireless ‘yes and’ is not to be stopped by mere maths. Oh no. Nearing the end of Found A Job, out comes a keyboard for Harrison. And a percussionist. And two guest backing singers. Then Bernie Worrell, the keyboardist from Funkadelic. And more percussion. And another guitarist. When we reach Life During Wartime, we’ve ascended into a glorious and irresistible writhing funk orgy. By the end Byrne is a madman, running laps of the stage as his harem tread rhythmically on the spot, like they’re leading us all to an ecstatic future, where we dance with the animals and rhythm is the world currency (and thus bears can buy chips).
Soon Byrne is serenading a lamp-shade, donning his infamous Big Suit, and becoming an ad-man cum preacher for Once In A Lifetime, while huge screens beam images of bookcases and random words like Onion. It’s all pretty epic and magical. When they round off the Cross-eyed and Painless finale, the sweat-drenched singer ushers the crew out onto stage to share in the applause. The sound men have their arms round each other. Meanwhile the audience has decided to sack off the earthly realm entirely in favour of a purely light-based existence.
To be honest it's just a really good gig, expertly conceived and executed. But as an illustration of what we’re aiming for with improv, it does make total sense. Imagine the crowd leaving that show. What a ride. We may start with an empty stage, without any ideas - let alone Jonathan Demme and a $1.3m budget, or even a tape deck - but if we can carry our audience on a trip from such humble beginnings to even a smattering of that joy, then we’ve done our job. As to whether the show needs to make any sense, that's up to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment