Talking Heads star David Byrne to tour Australia after new album drops
David Byrne will tour Australia in January in support of a new album of music, Who is the Sky?, set for release in September.
It will be the first time the former frontman of Talking Heads has played in this country since bringing his acclaimed American Utopia tour here in 2018.
As with that tour, the new show will feature a free-roaming band of musicians, singers and dancers, unencumbered by leads and amplifiers and able to roam the stage at will (albeit in highly choreographed fashion).
Many of the line-up for this tour also performed in American Utopia, a show that later moved to Broadway and was filmed by Spike Lee for a documentary released in 2020.
In recent weeks, 73-year-old Byrne has been teasing some upcoming news on his social media accounts. 'Hi, I'm working on something new and will have more news to share soon,' he said in a video posted on May 30, before offering a glimpse of new audio and typically idiosyncratic dance moves 'in the meantime'.
The news of a tour and a new album comes at a busy moment for the prolifically but sporadically creative Byrne. June 5 marked the 50th anniversary of the first gig by Talking Heads at legendary New York City venue CBGB, and to celebrate the occasion a video clip for the band's 1977 single Psycho Killer was released.
Directed by indie filmmaker Mike Mills and starring Oscar-winning Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, the clip – the first officially made for the song – appears to depict a woman gradually going through a depressive episode as the repetitive nature of her ordinary life begins to grind her down.
Despite the re-release in 2023 of a remastered version of the band's Jonathan Demme-directed concert film Stop Making Sense (to mark its 40th anniversary), rumours of a reunion and tour for the band remain just that, in part because of lingering tension between him and bassist Tina Weymouth.
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