David Byrne...

Another Sunday and the Arctic weather has returned. I’m parked up in Hebden Bridge, with snow falling and settling. I’m in the van, under a duvet, editing the chapter about heaven and hell, while David Byrne, of Talking Heads, is annotating his favourite music on Desert Island Discs (that’s a sentence I may never write again). I didn’t know he was born in Scotland.

One of his discs is Mr Tambourine Man, not by Bob Dylan, but by the Byrds. From the moment the guitar kicked in - Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker - Byrne said he had a musical epiphany. He sensed that something new was happening. “This was music for people like me”, he said. “and I knew I had to find other people who shared my tastes”. Mr Tambourine Man was my musical epiphany too (I’d heard Dylan already, though I wasn’t initially impressed. He sang, I thought, like an old man). It still sounds great, half a century later. If it wasn’t for the Byrds, I wouldn’t have found Dylan (it took me a while to ‘get’ him), or Neil Young, or Van Morrison, or the Velvet Underground, or Talking Heads…

Licenced a couple of pix today (unusual for a Sunday), of an over-stuffed bookshop in Eastbourne...