David Byrne vividly remembers his first meeting with Brian Eno, a man who would soon become both his producer and collaborator on a string of dazzlingly inventive records.

Byrne was riding the crest of the new wave with his band Talking Heads at the time, while Eno was on a creative roll of his own after his departure from Roxy Music.

“We were on a package tour with The Ramones, but we had a date of our own in Covent Garden,” Byrne recalls.

“John Cale [formerly of The Velvet Underground] brought Brian along as his guest. We were all thrilled because we were Roxy Music fans, and we became friends after that. It wasn’t until maybe a year later that we got around to saying, ‘Hey, do you want to work with us on our next record?’.

“It worked out great, because we were friends first and we weren’t introduced as if he was a prospective record producer.”

The encounter would be the starting point for a working relationship between the New Yorker and the Englishman that has lasted more than three decades and left a legacy of some of the late 1970s and early 1980’s landmark recordings.

This tour will see Byrne and his band perform a range of songs he recorded with Talking Heads with Eno on production duties – from 1978’s More Songs About Buildings And Food to Remain In Light, via Fear Of Music – as well as tracks from the albums the two created together outside of Talking Heads: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and last year’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Since his initial sessions with Talking Heads, Eno has become one of the industry’s most sought-after producers, working with the likes of U2, Coldplay and also Travis.

Byrne, too, has balanced solo success with his conceptual artwork and a series of high-profile collaborations with X-Press 2, as well as local hero Norman Cook on The Brighton Port Authority.

But the intensely creative period at the beginning of Byrne and Eno’s working relationship saw them throw together funk, world music and jittery rhythms on Remain In Light and pioneer the use of samples for My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.

Given the special place these recordings hold in the rock music anorak’s heart, it’s unsurprising that Byrne sought to avoid the weight of expectation when the pair began working together again two years ago. They’d met for dinner during promotional duties for a 2006 reissue of Bush Of Ghosts, and decided to collaborate on some demos of Eno’s to “see what happens”, opting not to publicise the project.

Gospel-inflected and saturated with poppy hooks and shiny acoustic guitars, the resulting record – Everything That Happens – is unlike anything the pair have produced before, meeting Byrne’s principal objective of avoiding a re-tread of past glories.

Engaging and friendly in conversation, the 56-year-old is remarkably straightforward about the pressure to deliver, and quite different from the slightly nervous, oblique character that comes over in early interviews.

“It took me ages to get started,” he says of his initial work providing melodies and vocals for Eno’s ideas.

“I think I had trepidations about how people would receive it and what kind of direction it would go in – all that sort of thing. Sometimes, for me, it requires living with it for a bit, and going, ‘OK, what does this bring to mind? Where’s their head at when they’re making these chord sequences?’, and Brian’s music, stripped of all the squiggly sounds, sounded very folky to me.”

In direct contrast to the almost vocal-free Bush Of Ghosts, Byrne’s distinctive voice is at the centre of the record – but there was little discussion with Eno about the direction the lyrics would take (Eno has since said Byrne responded to the demos with “sensitivity and skill”).

“He’s said more than once that he really doesn’t care that much about the words of songs,” Byrne says. “I think he’s waiting for the day when someone can help him come up with a software program that can generate words for him [laughs].”

Although initially a digital-only release, a deluxe edition of the album was released shortly afterwards, chock-full of bonus material including artwork, notes from Byrne and Eno and a “making of” video.

Byrne’s fascination with all things visual manifested itself early in Eno-era Talking Heads album sleeves (the More Songs About... cover he conceived was a photomosaic of the band made up of 529 Polaroid photos).

Is it important to him to hold on to that visual element against a backdrop of increasing downloads?

“It’s all a bit, ‘Make it up as you go along’ these days,” he says. “But the idea was to see if we can give people an interesting package that has stuff you basically can’t download, because of the physicality of it – let’s see if there are a certain number of people who would like that.

“The other people who just want the music can download it and save a lot of money.”

The guitar-led tracks on Everything... lend themselves naturally to the live arena, but Bush Of Ghosts, full of samples, found sounds and some mystifying production work, seems near-impossible to recreate on-stage.

“I’ve tried to do a few of the tracks [from the album] live over the years at various times,” Byrne says.

“A few years ago I tried one of them with an orchestra. The assignment for the arranger was to imitate all these weird, squiggly sounds, but I discovered that when I sang it, it didn’t work. There’s one we’re doing in the show now, though, called Help Me, Please, and because it’s really close to the preacher voice persona I’ve done on the Talking Heads songs it’s not that much of a stretch.”

Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads tour film Stop Making Sense documented a performance from a band who were injecting humour, crazed dancing and costumes into their shows.

This interest in stagecraft hasn’t deserted Byrne, and the tour sees the band take to the stage with a group of dancers.

“Concerts usually have video projections or smoke or something along those lines, and I think there are people who do that a lot better than I can, so I thought, ‘I haven’t seen anyone really use dancers in a way that’s interesting and that integrates with the band’. Usually it’s a very Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Madonna-type thing where they’re a kind of separate element and I thought, ‘Let’s see if we can bring it together’.”

Byrne’s knack for spotting a visual opportunity and his ear for interesting sounds were combined in New York last year for his installation Playing The Building, which saw him rig up an abandoned ferry terminal to a battered pump organ. Each key created a sound from the pipes, the radiators or the ceiling of the cavernous space. The installation is to reach historic Camden venue the Roundhouse later this year.

“It’ll be up there for about a month,” Byrne says. “It’s a great venue. We played there on our first gig of the tour with The Ramones, and I think The Stranglers, so it was a triple bill and there was lots of gobbing! [laughs].”

Byrne says he’d struggle to pick a favourite among the records he’s made with Eno because of the differences between them, but says Eno’s approach benefitted Talking Heads from the off.

“The first one he worked on, Buildings And Food, he really didn’t do a lot, but he did make the band more comfortable in the studio, and made it more like the performing situation we were used to – which in a way was doing a great deal.

“It made us play better and we ended up with a recording that sounded more like what the band sounded like, at least to our ears.”

After the release of the next album Fear Of Music and its successor, Remain In Light, tension began to develop between the other members of Talking Heads and the increasingly close Byrne/Eno partnership.

“I think after Remain In Light and Bush of Ghosts, Brian and I were pretty tight and very excited about the direction stuff was going in,” Byrne says.

“The others were very much involved in contributing musically to that stuff, but I think there was probably a feeling that Brian and I were getting a little too... enthusiastic on our own.”

Now, with Byrne bringing a concert’s worth of these tunes to Brighton, all that remains is for him to finalise the details of his regular cycle tour (with band and dancers in tow) for his date in the city.

A keen cyclist, Byrne never fails to explore the area he’s playing in by bike. As The Guide spoke to him, he’d taken a trip to an historic park in Oslo accompanied by the full tour cohort the day before, and was already formulating his Brighton route.

“It’ll be great,” he says. “There’s the seafront and from the east end of the city. I’m told there’s a pathway there... I haven’t done that one yet.”

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