The Catherine Wheel

David Byrne

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: December 1981
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sire / London/Rhino
• ASIN: B000002KNC
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #89,548 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential recording

Sounding more like a missing Talking Heads session than anything remotely like David Byrne's 1990s-era work, The Catherine Wheel is at root a display of funky, off-time rhythms and vamps with Byrne involved at every level. The music was composed and produced to accompany a Twyla Tharp-choreographed dance event, and for program music it's brilliant enough to stand alone. The 73 minutes are almost seamless, weaving ambient soundscapes with loopy percussion-backed bass runs with guitar strumming across the top. Byrne shows his command of dramatic scoring here, spreading his wings across a huge range of styles and doing so in a way that sounds both like his old band and entirely different from them. You can hear in The Catherine Wheel where Byrne was heading (i.e., heavily rhythmic music) years before the Heads were disbanded and he ventured into life as a Brazilian- and Latin-music impresario. It's the sound of a young genius having free reign, and as such it's exceptional. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funky masterpiece that floats., July 8, 1998

By	Jerome Kelly "Conventional Ear" (Fullerton, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The Catherine Wheel" will always be one of my favorite albums. Back in the mid 80's, when my college friend and I needed to decide on some good stereo music late at night, we'd look at each other, say "It!", and play "The Catherine Wheel." This collection of Talking-Heads-ish pieces will characterize your internal and external environment in the period during which you familiarize yourself with it. Hearing it years later will evoke many of the feelings and mental images that you experienced while listening to it. Usually, it takes at least whole year's worth of pop radio to achive this effect in me, but David Byrne did it in one CD. I've secretly been wishing that David Byrne would one day return temporarily to this style of his music: layered acoustic percussion and rhythm elements, freaky electric, not necessarily electronic, sounds and samples, and sparse melodies held together by Byrne's yelling-singing voice.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Lost Talking Heads Album., June 13, 2001

By	Tom (Palatine, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Like I have, I am sure that many Heads fans have wondered what happened between Stop Making Sense and Little Creatures. The leap seemed huge, bridging the gap from rythem based rock to the new era synth-pop sound of later Heads work. Both sounds work just fine for me, and I still consider Little Creatures to be among the best albums of the last 20 years.

While pre-dating both of the aformentioned ablums chronologically, Byrne's solo soundtrack work on "The Catherine Wheel" sounds very much like the foundational work for Little Creatures. It's as if Byrne knew, 5 years out, where he wanted to take the Heads - he just had to bring the rest of the band up to speed.

This is a fun album, lots of little fills and long, worldless background sutff - all great for a long drive.

So, if you're a Heads fan that has been looking for that ellusive missing link - I think this is it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF THE BEST EVER, but where is the COMPLETE score on CD?, November 27, 2004

By	G. Mitchell "greggmitch" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this cassette back in junior high school when I was truly obsessed with TALKING HEADS - they had just made the brave leap forward with the ENO-helmed REMAIN IN LIGHT, which remains in my TOP 10 of all time albums - but THIS original score for Twyla Tharp's dance production is in many ways even more mind-blowing, ground-breaking, and seminal - here Byrne is given free reign to do his thang and explore the very limits of music, percussion, vocals, and song structure, or lack thereof...truly truly SPELL-BINDING stuff! But here's the rub: my original long OOP cassette version that WB released (BLUE cover, not RED) contains the COMPLETE score, with many tracks/sections NOT found on the sadly abbreviated CD - I guess they couldn't fit all of its BRILLIANCE on one CD, so they chose to edit - now that it's legendary, why not re-issue an expanded, double-CD with the entire score for posterity?! And why not include some of the 12" MIXES of BIG BUSINESS, etc released on 12" only singles at the time?! Trust me, once you buy this and start listening, you will come back to it over & over again - this is over two decades and I still come back to it every few months - WAY AHEAD OF ITS TIME, NEVER GROWS OLD! Sadly, Byrne would never top this...I find all of this later TALKING HEADS (post-Speaking In Tongues) and solo projects dry, brittle, flat, and dull - that tired "world music" white man's burden trap. Oh well. At least we have THIS to cherish.