"Lazy" is a single by British house duo X-Press 2, featuring vocals from American singer and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. It was written and produced by X-Press 2 and co-written by Byrne. The song was released on 11 March 2002 through Skint Records and reached number two on the UK Singles Chart, held off number one by "Unchained Melody" by Gareth Gates, and spent four weeks in the UKtop 10. An orchestral re-recording of the song appears on Byrne's 2004 solo albumGrown Backwards. "Lazy" won the Ivors Dance Award at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2003.
Background
David Byrne initially approached X-Press 2 to ask them to be his backing band, but they turned the offer down. They confessed, "We had to tell him we're just a bunch of studio gits." As Byrne told Drowned in Sound, "I love the idea of a throbbing beat, and a dancefloor filled with energised bodies, and the singer proclaiming the merits of laziness." Byrne recorded his vocals at his home in New York and then sent them to X-Press 2's recording studio as an email attachment.
Critical reception
Writing in The Guardian, Gary Mullholland called the song "a cheery dance-pop record", whilst Helen Brown praised it as a "glorious dancefloor collaboration".
Music video
The music video is directed by Howard Shur. It features an extremely lazy man who has created a series of contraptions that enable him to go through his daily routine without moving at all. The video begins two shots of a bath with a green hosepipe covering the tap. Then the video shows a transparent pipe in the toilet, with what appears to be urine flowing through it; the camera follows the pipe all the way back to the man, who is urinating into it while sitting on a sofa. He pulls a number of levers with different labels on them, such as "Coffee", "Eggs" and "Toast". He also leans back and has a shower wash his hair automatically, after which it is dried by a hair dryer and combed. The man then presses a button which activates a remote-controlled car. As it collects his breakfast, he lies on his side and begins watching TV, but can't find anything on that is worth watching, so he pulls another lever which is labelled "Video"; this results in a robotic arm pushing a video labelled "X-Press 2" into the VCR. The video plays a workout video called "XPress-ercise 2", which features four women in thin black outfits. Upon seeing this, the man likes it and sits up. He uses another robotic arm to pick up the phone and hold it to his ear so that he can call someone. As the robot arrives with breakfast, it malfunctions, and stops just outside the man's reach. In response, the man hangs up the phone and stretches to reach the food, but falls off the sofa. Looking to his right, he sees a half-eaten Snickers which is covered in dust. Not wanting to stand up and collect his toast, eggs and coffee and continuing to have no luck stretching for them, he grabs the Snickers and starts eating it. The camera zooms outwards as he falls to sleep on the carpet.
Live performances
During a performance on Top of the Pops, X-Press 2 sat on a bunk bed and at a desk.
