The classic image of David Byrne will always be the big-suited, twitching oddball captured in Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense. However, his show in Wolverhampton provides another. Midway through Byrne's set, the audience begin spontaneously cheering and raising their glasses. Byrne looks bemused, but as the bizarre spectacle continues, pop's supreme anthropologist is overcome with emotion. If only Demme were here to film it all.
For the first time in two decades, Byrne is at the central point of pop, where his dental wail and lyrical pranks can wreak the maximum mental havoc. Last year's Look Into the Eyeball was his best solo album yet, and this year's single Lazy, a collaboration with techno duo X-Press 2, has given him his biggest hit in years.
Byrne, amazingly, is almost in party mood, leading his excellent band - including mini-orchestra - through a rendition of Lazy that wallops the recorded version. Now 48 and silver-haired, Byrne is supposedly less manic but retains an alien charisma, part funny and part disturbing. In his brown shirt and trousers, the more he plays the "regular guy", the weirder he seems. His bulging eyeballs seem to follow you around the room. He looks like Anthony Perkins playing a scout leader dancing on hallucinogenic drugs. "They're from, uh, Austin, Texas," he deadpans, introducing the musicians. "Texas is, uh, flat but not Austin." Then he reveals that And She Was was inspired by taking LSD - "in Baltimore, not the best place to experience cosmic visions".
The choice of material is faultless, spanning Eyeball, Talking Heads and wondrous lesser-known solo songs, such as What a Day That Was from the 1980s Catherine Wheel soundtrack. Byrne's eclectic palette is now colourful enough to juxtapose Latin funk and 1920s crooning, and he allows himself a mischievous grin during the line, "I feel numb - guess I must be having fun."
Having indulged in some bizarre bottom-waggling and even a moonwalk, Byrne finally can't resist one last irony: he leaves the delirious crowd with Road to Nowhere, a particularly exuberant song about the futility of human existence.
· David Byrne plays Barrowlands, Glasgow (0141-552 4601) tomorrow, then tours.
