We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy. Although best-known for his groundbreaking tenure fronting the new wave group Talking Heads , David Byrne is also acclaimed for his adventurous solo career, encroaching upon such diverse arenas as world music, filmmaking, and performance art in the process. But Byrne's passion for rhythms and sonic colors, his gift for angular but catchy melodies, and his keen and cooly witty but thoughtful observations of diverse characters are the through-lines that bring his catalog together. The son of an electronics engineer, he played guitar in a series of teenage bands before attending the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where, feeling alienated from the largely upper-class student population, he dropped out after one year. However, he remained in the Providence area, performing solo on a ukulele before forming the Artistics also known as the Autistics with fellow students Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.


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Sun 4 Mar Forty-one years later, the man, the venue and the fans have all changed. Nobody spits. Byrne came up with the idea two years ago. Obama was on his way out, Trump was on his way up, and Byrne wanted to alleviate the gloom by collating stories of positive change from around the world — not grand schemes but small, pragmatic innovations that work. Looking like a dapper academic with his sharp grey suit and shock of white hair, the year-old clicks through his slides: carbon-neutral urban planning in Sweden, high-speed bus lanes in South America, an anti-corruption game show in Africa.
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Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. Two years after his birth, his parents moved to Canada, settling in Hamilton, Ontario. His father worked as an electronics engineer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. His mother later became a teacher. The family had left Scotland in part because work for his father's engineering skills were in short supply and in part because of the tensions in the extended family caused by his parents' " mixed marriage ", his father being Catholic and his mother Presbyterian. Before high school, Byrne already knew how to play the guitar, accordion, and violin. He was rejected from his middle school 's choir because they claimed he was "off- key and too withdrawn". From a young age, he had a strong interest in music.