Music

David Byrne, the iconic lead singer of the Talking Heads in the 1980s, is someone special. Although he was born in the small Scottish town of Dumbarton in 1952, his parents soon moved to Ontario in Canada and then to Arbutus, another small town, this time in the US state of Maryland. He would later become an American citizen. Even in his youth he was already a globetrotter. In the course of his later career, after - of course - studying art and design, he would continue his wanderings to the boundaries of musical genres.

When he formed the Talking Heads in 1974 with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, two other students at the Rhode Island School of Design, he was already making a name for himself with his nasal voice and almost epileptic body movements. Not to mention the subject matter of songs like 'Psycho Killer', 'Life During Wartime' and the hypnotic 'Take Me To The River'.

Soon, however, Byrne was no longer satisfied with life in a band (of which he was, after all, the undisputed master) and felt the urge to go solo and, above all, to experiment constantly. In 1981, with Brian Eno, long-time producer of the Talking Heads, he made the strange "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", an often abrupt collage of African rhythms and mixed sounds. He also collaborated with choreographer Twyla Tharp ("The Catherine Wheel") and Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci on "The Last Emperor".

Then, like Peter Gabriel with Real World, he founded his own world music label (Luaka Bop) on which he recorded other artists (such as Zap Mama and Cornershop) as well as his own music, steeped in merengue, mambo, Cuban rhythms and many other references to world music.

David Byrne is a jack-of-all-trades, sometimes bordering on genius, and remains unflappably on his own path, which is far from straightforward! From theatre to television, dance to film: he is interested in all forms of artistic expression.

Fun fact: it was his song "Radio Head", written with Jerry Harrison, on the album "True Sories" in 1986 that inspired Thom Yorke to give a name to his band....
 
Photo: David Byrne, with the Talking Heads, on stage at the Werchter Festival (Belgium) on 4 July 1982 (© Etienne Tordoir)