Sleeping Beauties by David Byrne review – a quirky journey through the afterlife of invention
The Talking Heads frontman considers dormant ideas that made a comeback – from Indian irrigation to Kafka
There’s barely been a moment in the last half-century when David Byrne hasn’t been zinging about, dancing forward, opting odd. The art-school dropout frontman of Talking Heads, he moved sideways into ballet, dance and experimental theatre, collaborated on the proto-ambient LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with his fellow polymath Brian Eno, directed films, wrote musicals (on – of course – Imelda Marcos), co-founded a label (Luaka Bop) that introduced the likes of Os Mutantes and William Onyeabor to a new generation, brought out books of tree drawings, and designed bicycle racks.
Byrne’s career – by most measures a remarkably successful one – has been built from code-switching, fidgety intelligence, stylistic infidelity. At first glance then, it’s surprising that Sleeping Beauties is devoted to failure – to artists who were ignored, laughed at, forgotten; to ideas deemed batty or heretical; to ways of thinking about the world – sustaining it, replenishing it – that, often for political reasons, were found wanting, and wiped from our collective memory banks. Sleeping beauties is (of course) a term he first encountered in an academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan. That was in 2004: this book, like a lot of the ideas and energies it animates, needed time to ferment.
