DAVID BYRNE (National Stadium, Dublin)

ANYONE who was party to Talking Heads’ tete à tete with rumbled rhythms on Stop Making Sense knows that David Byrne can get down buck naked with the best of them. Nevermind the cerebral aesthete who’s played anchorman to one of New York’s finest quartets. Long and skinny he may be, but Byrne’s no stranger to the sweat and salt of the dancefloor and tonight it looked for a long while like he was going to let a whole rake of Latin rhythms seduce and debauch all round him.

But then he let it go, all of it, the precise pulses disintegrating into a muddy indefinable morass. Having charmed all and sundry with his Latin love affair on Rei Momo and Uh – Oh we came expecting some serious fiesta fare and while he opened with a handful of fine foottappers it was though he’d OD’d before anyone else had had so much as a tincture of an infusion.

Granted he had the decency and intelligence to spice the proceedings with a healthy dose of Talking Heads outtakes that lassooed the strays among us back to the fold with lemminglike ease. ‘And She Was’ and ‘Road To Nowhere’ were but wry reminders of just how good they were way back when Tina Weymouth & Co. could bear being in the same building as Byrne. And small wonder it was then that it took a manic unplugged version of ‘Burning Down The House’ to unleash the foottappers in earnest.

Funny thing was, that when Mauro Refosco and Todd Turkisher unveiled their assortment of mallets, cymbals, bongos and things that sounded curiously like yelping terriers, it looked like we were in for some serious musical journeying down a Latin American spine. ‘My Love Is You’ and ‘Girls On My Mind’ were shimmering, shimmying wide-eyed delights with Byrne twisting his steel acoustic guitar along a crazily-paved road carved by Paul Socolow’s mesmerising acoustic bass and the other’s percussion. The jazz, African and Caribbean threads were woven so tightly that not a pinprick of stray light got through.

From there though it was an autopilot job that disintegrated into sloppy guitar work and an overindulgent dependence on a bloated drumkit. The party faltered. The rhythms diluted. The crowd strained to carry on fingerclicking. David Byrne hardly seemed to notice. For him it seemed like this was just one more date on the tour calendar. Pity. He used to know better.

• Siobhán Long