Moth Club Hosts David Byrne’s Night. 28.1.23.
Under the gold ceiling of Moth Club’s East London venue that glitters like a jigsaw of blurry diamonds, equally fulgent sounds palpitate through the sold-out crowd.
Wall-to-wall we all dance until we sweat. On stage, an endlessly rotating set of musicians – a sugary pick ‘n’ mix of instrumentalists and singers from post-punk pariah’s Deadletter, the unwavering PVA, the exciting and emergent Bande Á Part, fan favourites Goat Girl, and the appropriately named Honeyglaze, among others – squirmed about in oversized suits and with more energy to boot, ejecting all of the monotonic manic drama and panting heat-stroked gestures that David Byrne himself feverishly seared into our collective memories in Stop Making Sense.
Above Photos by Manasvi Dethekar
Byrne’s and Talking Head’s music is so fucking infectious that there wasn’t any of that unpacifiable joy lost in translation. Their songs have always been described as “timeless”, sonically situated in the future-already-here and the past-still-around, both somehow still progressive even while drenched in nostalgia’s diaphora. Even scratching at the funky, addictive, paranoid rhythms of Byrne and Talking Heads is bound to wind up being as narcotised and euphoric as a night of live music can be.
Above Photos by Maddy O’Keefe
Set against the tinselly backdrop of Moth Club while celebrating, as the event’s poster ascribed, “Scotland’s second greatest poet”, this special “Byrne’s Night” might have accidentally just rested the case against their own claim.
Above Photos by Maddy O’Keefe
Header photo by Maddy O’Keefe
Issue Forty-One of So Young is out now and available to read in print here or as a digital magazine below.
