David Byrne just keeps on redefining the concert experience.
It’s an adventure that he embarked during the early days with his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act Talking Heads, best witnessed today by revisiting director Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking concert documentary “Stop Making Sense” from 1984, and he’s still finding new and dramatic ways to tinker with the process on his current Who Is the Sky? Tour.
A full house of fans turned out to see the results on Tuesday night (Aug. 25) at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, which marked the trek’s third time through the Bay Area — following a three-night run in November at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco and then a one-nighter back in April at the Frost Amphitheater on the Stanford University campus.
Taking the stage just after 8 p.m., Byrne would delight his longtime followers with a roughly 100-minute show that consisted of 21 songs. As expected, the Talking Heads numbers — of which there were 11 played on this night — proved to be the most popular with the audience members. Yet, fans were also moderately appreciative of the solo material, which included five songs from Byrne’s so-so new album (and tour namesake) “Who’s the Sky?” from 2025.
Visually, however, everything was pretty much equally spellbinding — which is the true greatness of this tour. Building upon what he accomplished with the highly applauded tour for 2018’s “American Utopia,” as well as the associated Broadway show and Spike Lee-directed performance film, Byrne is once again working with a large cast of mobile musicians, untethered from cords and other bits of stationary apparatus and free to roam about the stage.
The result is so unlike what were are used to seeing on the concert arena — where, for example, the drummer is put in the middle of the action and stays there for the entire performance — as the musicians constantly swirl about the stage in ways that always enhance and, at times, mimic the music itself. The choreography of the dozen-plus players on the stage is exuberant, playful and brilliantly timed, creating moments that draw both applause and gasps of joy from the crowd.
Byrne and an initially small group of players kicked off the evening with a lovely, slowed-down take on “Heaven,” the Talking Heads masterpiece from Side 2 of 1979’s “Fear of Music,” then more musicians and dancers joined in for the new album’s upbeat “Everybody Laughs.”
It was the tour’s first date back in the U.S., following a run of shows in Asia, something Byrne would allude to when he first took time to greet the crowd in Berkeley.
“We arrived here from Seoul. A little bit jetlagged,” the visionary singer-songwriter said. “But we did get out and about.”
He’d then take time to show us, via the three big screens placed at the back of the stage, what the band saw as they were “out and about” in the Berkeley area. The images included a drawing of “monster television” that they found at a store, a small car with an huge speaker system and plenty of trees.
The crowd really ate up the Talking Heads favorite “And She Was,” tolerated “Strange Overtones” from Byrne and Brian Eno’s 2008 collaborative effort “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” and was probably a bit too generous with their applause with such new album mediocrities as “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party” and “My Apartment Is My Friend.”
Fortunately, Byrne left the new album and other solo efforts behind during the latter stages of the 90-minute main set. Instead, he gave fans exactly what they wanted and charged right into a four-song run of Talking Heads classics — “Air,” a deliriously good “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime” and, finally, a powerful “Once In a Lifetime” that brought the main set to a close.
The troupe then returned for an all-“House” encore, sending audience home happy with a double shot of the “American Utopia” offering “Everybody’s Coming to My House” and then the Talking Heads smash “Burning Down the House.”
David Byrne setlist:
1. “Heaven”2. “Everybody Laughs”3. “And She Was”4. “Strange Overtones”5. “Houses in Motion”6. “T Shirt”7. “(Nothing but) Flowers”8. “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”9. “What Is the Reason for It?”10. “Like Humans Do”11. “When We Are Singing”12. “Independence Day”13. “Slippery People”14. “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”15. “My Apartment Is My Friend”16. “Air”17. “Psycho Killer”18. “Life During Wartime”19. “Once in a Lifetime”Encore:20. “Everybody’s Coming to My House”21. “Burning Down the House”
