ROCK / History plays: David Byrne has revised the old standards with a new band. Kevin Jackson joins the encores at the Brixton Academy

ALL together now: 'This ain't no Mudd Club/No CBGB . . .' In an evening of material culled from the last quarter-century, including a personal catalogue going back 16-odd years, the only dated line David Byrne could be heard to whoop, yodel or bark was that unrhymed couplet from 'Life During Wartime' (surely, by the way, the best song ever written about covert paramilitary operations?). When it was young, 'Life During Wartime' seemed plausibly like the kind of thing you might indeed have heard at a mid-Seventies venue like CBGB - all driving guitars, synthesisers and panic- stricken vocals.

Now, in the wake of Byrne's shorter Latin primers like Rei Momo, the tune has been given a decidedly Old Wave syncopation, and a four-piece brass section has taken over its guitar riff. It sounds less like the work of a prep-school punk than a cross between John Barry's score for Goldfinger and an out-take from The Mambo Kings. Perhaps Byrne should revise the lyrics to fit his fresh arrangement: 'This ain't no Copacabana. . .'? In fact, one of the few musical styles from North or South America not quoted during his show was the New Wavery with which Talking Heads first made a splash.

The effect could easily have been flippant, or even Stalinist (how do you deal with little embarrassments from your past? Liquidate them). Instead, these revisions of Talking Heads standards simply emphasised how robust they were, how little dependent on particular studio tricks or musicians. This was especially evident in the first half, when Byrne played and sang to his own semi- acoustic guitar with only a beatbox for company. The set had a matching spareness - dark backdrop, single white overhead spot and a lighting scheme borrowed, it's a fair bet, from the work of some avant-garde theatre director.

Eight songs received the solo treatment, including a rabble- rousing 'Road to Nowhere', a couple of tracks from Uh-oh and a country song by the Texas Tornados boasting the classic hook line 'Who were you thinking of/ When we were making love/ Last night?'. Byrne chewed on this cornpone with great aplomb, no doubt made confident by his austere preacher's outfit of black suit and white shirt, with Nashville- style slicked-back hair and sideburns.

His voice is a little deeper and a lot firmer than it was in the early days, and, pace the 'Psychokiller' line ('I'm tense and nervous, I can't relax'), he's manifestly comfortable on stage, even giving one or two running footnotes on vocabulary - 'billboards - I think you (the British) call them hoardings'.

After a sprightly run through 'Girls Girls Girls', the curtain was lowered (a bit clumsily) to reveal his nine-piece band, banked in two rows - keyboards, bass and three percussionists as well as the horns. Byrne swapped his acoustic for a cream-finished electric that seemed still to have a price tag dangling from its lead, and the ensemble shifted gear into a rowdy 'Mr Jones', the first of a bulky set that drew heavily on Naked, Rei Momo and Uh-oh. It was loud - a Heavy Metal fan's idea of how Latin music should sound - sharply played, and it drove the audience to roars of approval that rivalled the PA's decibel level.

Again, the lighting plot burgeoned and shifted in precise sympathy with the instrumentation: the band, swaying rhythmically, were thrown into mauve silhouettes for moodier pieces such as 'Women versus Men' and caught in harsh spotlights for brasher displays like 'Blind'. Byrne had soon shed his jacket, shaken his sweaty hair loose and was sprinting, lurching and going into frenzied spasms that would turn an Inuit shaman green with professional envy.

After more than 90 minutes of all this the crowd were still calling out for more. They got it, four times over. The first set of encores included a big-band rendition of one of Byrne's most stirring and mysterious songs, 'Burning down the House' (about transmigration of souls, he has hinted - any the wiser?), and a wildly improbable cover of 'Sympathy for the Devil' in which the crowd obligingly provided the 'woo woo' noises originally supplied by Anita Pallenberg and Co, and which Byrne warbled in a manner that alluded to Bryan Ferry rather than to Jagger. Then it was back to the solo acoustics: a punchy 'Psychokiller' to appease the groundlings and, finally, a fragile, lonely rendition of 'Heaven'. 'The band in Heaven play my favourite songs. . .', he crooned. Judging by the final uproar, the band in the Academy had done just the same, and made some of those old favourites new into the bargain.

(Photograph omitted)