David Byrne - The Knee Plays

You’ll recognise “knee plays” as those little scenes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama where a couple of characters will act out some rather random little comic sketch in front of the curtain, while the bigger scenes are prepared behind them. The Knee Plays is the David Byrne-penned soundtrack to a series of these that were to run between scenes of a theatrical epic called the CIVIL warS, which was to be premiered at the Olympic Arts Festival alongside the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. The Knee Plays has just been lavishly reissued on Nonesuch Records.

In the end, they were the only part of the CIVIL warS to ever be performed, as the funding for the 10-hour play, in which each act had its own set and cast shipped from another country, and which was to feature David Bowie acting alongside kabuki theatre stars, with Philip Glass scoring, was pulled. Shame, it sounds like a hit.

The music for The Knee Plays had to be loud enough to drown out the sounds of the CIVIL warS that would be getting ready behind them. Byrne tried traditional kabuki percussion to match the Japanese dramatic forms on stage (recordings of which are included as bonus tracks on this disc) before taking an inspired 90-degree turn by using a brass band. From this already idiosyncratic musical base, he wrote some spoken word pieces to be read out over the top. “They were certainly unrelated to the stage action”, says Byrne in the liner notes. "But I realized that things that happen simultaneously are often presumed by the heart and mind to be related in some way…When you look up at clouds in the city, and the sound you hear is hip-hop and traffic noises, well, that’s the score for the cloud image”.

Byrne, right, with director Robert Wilson and collaborator Adelle Lutz. Note Byrne's snazzy homemade cardboard slippers.

The story happening onstage is a mimed Japanese folktale about sailing to a strange land, but his words describe all sorts of scenarios. In “The Sound Of Business”, a road movie narrative becomes an antsy meditation on the nature of modern movement and commerce, before dissolving into an oblique list of fictional song titles playing on the car radio, a list almost with its own narrative. “I’d remembered JG Ballard saying once that lists, ads, codes, and instructions manuals are the invisible literature of today”, Byrne says.

David Byrne - The Sound Of Business (zshare link)

I also love “(The Gift Of Sound) Where The Sun Never Goes Down”, a naïve yet oddly wise tale of sounds in a cinema being unable to escape until they are set free by someone opening the doors, "to become forever part of the landscape".

David Byrne - (The Gift Of Sound) Where The Sun Never Goes Down (zshare link)

He cites Dada and Surrealism as being an influence, and I think he gets the original concept of the Surreal absolutely right. Rather than “surreal” being almost outside of reality, as it has come to mean, it is meant to be more akin to our term “hyper-real”, a heightened form of reality where anything can and does happen. Take "Social Studies", where a bird landing on a boat is soundtracked by a think-piece about social assimilation being created by people eating the same food.

David Byrne - Social Studies (zshare link)

The music itself is immaculately performed, and covers a lot of ground. In some pieces, jazzy timbres and rhythms are tempered by a dignified theatricality, recalling the starlit sheen of Gershwin. Elsewhere, Byrne’s interests in commodification are rendered with a kind of glorious Muzak, lift-music lullabies that are not snide or condemnatory but that make an uplifting Surrealistic case for the universality of sound. Optimistic fanfares and music hall oompah also feature, while “Winter” is a beautifully minimal landscape of held chords that sounded amazing as Jen and I drove down a deserted motorway outside Burnley with the rain lashing down.

Big love to my housemate Dave for buying me this for Christmas. Buy it yourself at Rough Trade here.