Olivia Rodrigo headlined the Governor’s Ball festival in New York over the weekend and brought on as a guest someone who is a bona fide NY music legend: David Byrne.
The Talking Heads frontman came on to duet with Rodrigo on a cover of Burning Down the House. It was an appropriate song choice – the festival’s start time had had to be delayed for four hours, due to some, ahem, “nasty weather”, as heavy rain swept through the New York region.
As you can see from the footage below, Byrne appeared in red dungarees, strumming an acoustic. That was soon discarded and the pair indulge in some neat syncopated dance moves – bending their waves, jogging together and twirling around. They look like they having an absolute blast.
The sight of Byrne having fun on stage might be some small compensation for the Talking Heads fans whose hopes were raised last week when the band’s social media accounts posted a picture of a full moon coupled with the date June 5, 2025.
It was, not coincidentally, fifty years to the day since Byrne and co played their first ever gig at CBGBs in New York. This led to all sorts of speculation from fans that the band was going to announce a reunion tour – a non-unreasonable hope, given that the four members have appeared in public a number of times over the last year or so, mainly to promote the reissue of Stop Making Sense, and – on the face of it – seem to be more relaxed in each other’s company than at any time since they split in the early 1990s.
In the end, the ominous teaser presaged nothing more exciting than a new video for their first single Psycho Killer, starring Saoirse Ronan. Interesting, but something of an anti-climax, it must be said.
The new video doesn’t mark the end of Talking Heads activity this summer, though – July will see the reissue of their second album, 1978’s More Songs About Buildings And Food in a variety of formats.
