The whole ensemble are constantly on their feet, always moving, instruments strapped on like front-facing proton packs. No-one is rooted to the spot by drums or keyboards. In American Utopia, Byrne takes a more stripped back approach, utilising a smaller space and a band who are all onstage for most of the performance, yet it is no less ambitious in its conception. In Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert film of all, Byrne’s concepts make the film come to life like narrative cinema, with a slowly growing number of people on stage, dramatic lighting, unexpected props and iconic costume changes. Not only is he one of the greatest, most fascinating frontmen in musical history, but his precise, innovative and invigorating approach to the staging of his music in the live forum comes as close as you can get to that elusive formula for guaranteed satisfaction. David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, is the perfect subject for the medium of the concert movie. It’s no coincidence that two of the aforementioned films have a major player in common. And now Spike Lee has done it with David Byrne’s American Utopia. Jonathan Demme did it with Stop Making Sense. Martin Scorsese did it with The Last Waltz. Keep the music alive everyone!) and even if a filmmaker is lucky enough to be in attendance on one of those gloriously special nights, they have to be good enough at their job to make the whole thing come alive for audiences at home. It’s no mean feat, considering that watching a gig on a screen can rarely, if ever, live up to actually being in the audience (though we’re grateful for all those live streams at the moment. The job of a great concert film is to capture one of these experiences on film for all time. These genuinely extraordinary gigs are perhaps as rare as the dreary ones but while the disappointments can be quickly and quietly filed away with life’s other let-downs, the transcendent experiences stay with you for a lifetime, rewriting your timeline, adjusting your future expectations and nourishing your music-loving heart. And then there are those certain evenings that turn out to be so indescribably joyous that you reel from them for days afterwards, treasuring the high-pitched ringing in your ears as a souvenir. Of course, such miserable experiences are few and far between and most gigs I’ve been to over the years have been at least solidly enjoyable, many of them great. I long for the time in years (months? decades?) to come when I can start hating such experiences again, rather than longing for their dank disappointments. And yet I feel I would enjoy even one of these nightmare evenings right now. But only the lucky few have never experienced watching a band they love flounder on stage while hoping this is the last song, desperately holding onto that urgent piss while counter-productively quaffing the pint they bought even though they were full. You’ve paid the money so you try to make the best of it, to stick it out to the bitter end. But the truth is we’ve all been to some disappointing gigs in our time. Gigs, for instance, seem like a holy grail to us music lovers and the temptation is to remember every single one we’ve been to as a positive experience. In such uncertain times, we long for the comforts of a world we are already struggling to remember accurately. Or maybe, to look at it more optimistically, we’re at the end of one… or it could just be just the beginning. As I write this, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
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