David Byrne digs into the past for the present at WFC

Picture on a stage, a band clad in all-white uniforms like merry milkmen or renegade cricket players. For vignettes, background singers roll on the ground while dancers run away with their microphones. A singer, strumming a guitar, spins in a swivel chair. Cue the leapfrogging dancer.

The latest incarnation of David Byrne - a theatrical folk gospel of the absurd - kicked off Wednesday night at the Wells Fargo Center with the former Talking Head singing, "This groove is out of fashion. These beats are 20 years old" on the new song "Strange Overtones."

Painfully relevant if at times esoteric, there's always been something oddly fashionless (remember the big suit in "Stop Making Sense"?) and timeless and even breathless about the entire globe-trotting Byrne oeuvre.

Starting in the mid '70s, The Talking Heads fused disparate strains of world music, funk, punk and new wave. Byrne and collaborator Brian Eno presaged many of the finer points of sampling with the experimental 1981 album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." And their latest album "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today" leans toward the acoustic and aspirational.

So when the concert was billed as a tribute to "the songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno," considering Eno was often called a virtual fifth member of the Talking Heads when he produced them, it meant anything goes.

Led by a spry, white-haired Byrne, the eight-piece band and three dancers spread out over the decades. "Take Me To The River" had Byrne kicking up his heels and running in place. He delved into "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" for the paranoia of "Help Me Somebody." Driving home the politics, he followed up the new song "One Fine Day" by making sure we didn't miss the point: "There's a lyric in that song - 'everything could change' - and that day could be Nov. 4."

But it was the Talking Heads gem "Crosseyed and Painless" -- 10 songs later and nearly an hour into the set - that kicked it into a full-on sweaty, pulsating, rhythmic concert and picked the entire sold-out crowd out of their seats.

Throw in Talking Heads classics "Life During Wartime," "Burning Down the House" and "Once in a Lifetime" (cue the dancer leapfrogging over Byrne as he played the guitar) and the night was almost complete (alas, no "Psycho Killer").

Considering that Byrne has always scoffed at the idea of a Talking Heads reunion, this may be the closest thing we'll ever see.