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David Byrne

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The Talking Heads frontman has spent his solo decades turning the concert itself into choreography — marching bands, mobile ensembles, no cables.

David Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1952. His family moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and then, when he was eight or nine, to the Baltimore area, where his father worked as an electronics engineer. Byrne grew up speaking with a Scottish accent but adopted an American one to fit in at school.

By high school he played guitar, accordion and violin, despite once being rejected from his school choir for being "off-key and too withdrawn." He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and later the Maryland Institute College of Art, dropping out of both. It was at RISD that he met Chris Frantz, with whom he formed a short-lived band called the Artistics.

Byrne moved to New York City in 1974; Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth followed later that year, and Weymouth learned bass so the three could play together. Talking Heads formed in 1975. As the band's singer and principal writer, Byrne shaped a nervous, rhythm-driven strain of new wave that gradually absorbed funk and West African influences. The group released eight studio albums, seven of them certified gold or platinum, before disbanding in 1991.

His solo career has ranged widely: collaborations with Brian Eno, film scoring, the Luaka Bop label he founded to release music from Latin America and elsewhere, books, and installation work.

American Utopia, released as an album and later staged as a theatre production filmed by Spike Lee, presented a barefoot ensemble carrying every instrument, untethered from cables and amplifiers, and remains the clearest statement of his interest in performance as movement.

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art rocknew wave