Dissecting Lazy from David Byrne And X-Press 2

The combination of David Byrne & X-Press 2 in the early noughties was one of the biggest mainstream musical curve balls, which is largely underplayed and forgotten. 'Lazy' won the Ivors Dance Award at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2003 and Byrne later included an orchestral re-recording of the song on his 2004 solo album 'Grown Backwards'. Here we have a video on the track, its inception, and genre-bending wackyness - with the timestamps and more info below the official video:

Here's more: 

In the late eighties and early nineties, club culture was huge in the UK. If you lived for nightlife in that period, particularly in the capital, a veritable smorgasbord of new sounds was on offer - acid house, techno, breakbeat, DnB, rave. Clubs like Shoom, Cream and Ministry of Sound offered new experiences and people to meet, cosplaying as followers in a church where God was a DJ. Perhaps there was never a more exciting time to be on the dancefloor, period.

In the haze of the scene, three such nightlife-enthusiasts would form a new group, their shared love for the hedonism and communalism of the dancefloor forming within them a desire to take the new emergent sound into their own hands to put their own stamp on it. The trio would call themselves X-Press 2, and they would soon make their mark on London's club scene with their cut 'Muzik Express'.

It would go on to be a club classic, played in scuzzy clubs all over the UK and in New York's Sound Factory, a mecca for clubbers across the globe, and hugely important in the development of house music. Despite their vertiginous rise, however, X-Press 2 suddenly changed tack, and formed a new collective called The Ballistic Brothers. This new outfit had a much mellower, laconic sound and style that owed more to the nascent chill-out sound than the crucible of dance and electronic from which the trio had come. Across the Atlantic, one David Byrne - the lead singer of the now defunct yet highly influential art rock band Talking Heads, heard The Ballistic Brothers and decided to tap them up the trio to ask if they could open for him for his upcoming tour, to promote his record 'Feelings'.

The three had to decline, but years later, preparing cuts for their own debut record 'Muzikuzum', they contacted Byrne to see if he would instead be up for a potential collaboration. To their surprise, Byrne was up for it, and the resulting recording, 'Lazy', is a proper oddity of a record, a track that contains the muted euphoria of a deep house club record, and yet contained the vocals of one of the most prominent art rockers on the planet. In his vocal track, which Byrne recorded and emailed over to the trio in just a couple of takes, Byrne would riff on the subject of a man so bone-deep lazy that it affects everything he does.

Lazy when I'm loving, lazy when I play', so the song goes, and a thousand times even more so, when with his paramour. It's innocuous, but catchy as hell, and at the same time, weirdly prescient. It feels relatable, perhaps more than it ever has, twenty years later, when clubs are closing across the world, because of how happy we are all in our shared idleness. This is the story of how 'Lazy' was made, a curious marriage of deep-house and art pop, a sound that worked despite the odds.

Timestamps

00:00 - 00:54 Introduction: The story behind 'Lazy'

00:55 - 02:18 A quick recap of UK club culture in the late eighties and early nineties

02:19 - 04:21 Formation of X-Press 2, 'Muzik Express', The Ballistic Brothers

04:22 - 05:29 David Byrne of Talking Heads gets in touch

05:30 - 08:41 Dissecting Lazy - the sound, the lyrics, the sentiment

08:42 - 09:23 That verse with the feels

09:24 - 10:58 'Lazy's legacy: an unusual but influential collaboration, a marriage of art pop and deep house **

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