"The story I am interested in is about asking what drives a powerful person—what makes them tick? How do they make and then remake themselves?"

This is how David Byrne introduces his collaborative project, Here Lies Love. Byrne, the energetic architect-cum-musician-cum-artist-cum-traveller-cum-writer, decided that the life of Imelda Marcos neatly leads us to such questions and answers. Musically, Byrne works with Fatboy Slim – of all people.

“I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if—as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music—one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theatre to the disco? Was that possible? If so, wouldn’t that be amazing!”

Byrne has so far released two preview tracks through the project’s website. The first, released some weeks back but still available, features Santigold on vocals.

The most recent release features the lively Sharon Jones on vocals, dancing upon the enormous slabs laid down by Slim’s big-beat production.


She’s a worthy, characterful vocalist, capable of matching the unsubtle boom-bap rhythm that Slim provides here.

Nevertheless, these early tastes of the album prove a little disappointing. Fatboy Slim’s production tastes seem permanently stuck at the year he reached his fame – and ten years hence, he's a cartoon of himself, suggesting a complacent, grinning Hawaiian-shirted idiocy that, here, actively detracts from the great concept, lyrics and vocalists that Byrne provides. The involvement of Slim and the Microsoft Publisher design aesthetic suggest either an impulse to get the thing out there, no matter how it looks and sounds – or something operating at a level of irony that I simply fail to understand.


For those that are operating on a higher plane than me, prepare for the 22-track double disc album, featuring guest vocalists to be released on April 6. The guest names are impressive: Florence Welch (she of The Machine), St Vincent, Tori Amos, Martha Wainwright, Cyndi Lauper, Roisin Murphy, Camille, Sia and My Brightest Diamond.

The website gives a background to the squandered potential in all this: check Byrne’s notes about the Jones track, featuring pictures of Marcos dancing with sharp-looking dudes and historical speculation.

The deluxe edition of the release features 100 pages of this stuff in a hardcover book, plus a DVD with six videos.