In 1997 my business started to take off and I overworked despite catching a bug until my bewildered GP told me to go straight to hospital, where I found out I had pneumonia and pleurisy. After I got out, the doctors told me I needed at least two weeks' recuperation before I could even think about going back to work. My parents drove to Sheffield to take me down to Sidlesham and take care me of there. During those weeks I barely moved from the sofa where I watched Powell and Pressburger films on video, and tennis and Glastonbury on TV. (It was the year of Radiohead at Glastonbury: I was interested but unmoved.) I must have also watched the Ashes test matches, but somehow my memory has blotted out all but the glorious first day of the first match. I read James Joyce's The Dubliners, Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, John Bracewell's England is Mine and, morbidly under the circumstances, Arno Karlen's Plague's Progress.
And I sent my mother out with a shopping list of new CDs I wanted. This was one of them.
A lot of the David Byrne albums blur together for me. The early ones — Catherine Wheel, The Knee Plays and Rei Momo, all recorded when he was still in Talking Heads — each have a distinct character, as does The Forest. The others all have a few above par songs, a few below par songs, a few more or a few less strings, and varying degrees of Brazilian rhythms. This is one of them. I remember it mainly for the lyrics about the Oklahoma bombings and "terrorists acting out of love, sweet love".
The spoof game on the inside cover is fun, and anticipates David Byrne's later PowerPoint art works.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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