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David Byrne - Music & Art Bio

Born Dumbarton, Scotland. Currently lives in New York.
Attended Rhode Island School of Design and Maryland Institute College of Art.

MUSIC
   
David Byrne is well known as the musician who co-founded the group Talking Heads (1976–88) in New York. On record and in concert, the band was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike; more importantly, however, they have proven to be extremely influential. Talking Heads took popular music in new directions, both in terms of sound and lyrics, and also introduced an innovative visual approach to the genre.

During his time with the group, Byrne was involved with several other projects.

• The Catherine Wheel. (an evening-length ballet score for choreographer Twyla Tharp)
• Music Videos, director.
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a record incorporating "found" voices such as radio preachers, talk show guests and Arabic singers (re-release with additional tracks in March 2006)
• The Knee Plays- a brass band-and-spoken word score for a theater piece, The Knee Plays, directed by Robert Wilson.
• Stop Making Sense. 1984, directed by Jonathan Demme, winner of Golden Globes, best documentary
• True Stories, 1986, feature film directed by Byrne
• The Last Emperor, 1987, DB collaborates on score for Bertolucci film, wins Oscar.
• Luaka Bop, Byrne's record label, was founded in 1988
• The Forest, 1989, an orchestral score with mostly wordless vocals for theater piece dir by Robert Wilson
• Ilé Aiyé: The House of Life, 1989, a documentary on African religion in Brazil

More records followed
• Rei Momo, collaboration with 15 of the best Latin musicians in New York.
• Uh-Oh, 1992, funk and Latin grooves were combined together
• Between The Teeth, a concert film of that tour.
• David Byrne, 1994, a stripped-down record
• Feelings, 1997, collaboration with other bands and artists
• The Visible Man, 1998, a record of re-mixed versions of songs from Feelings.

• Sessions at West 54th Street, 1999, a weekly one-hour music show which Byrne hosted.
• In Spite Of Wishing And Wanting. 1999 a collaborationwith the Belgian Dance Company Ultima Vez,
• Look Into The Eyeball, 2001. Subsequently Byrne toured with a six-piece string section.
• Lazy, 2002 David's collaboration with the DJ group X Press 2 was released in the UK. The song went to number 2 on the UK charts within its first week of release & number 1 on the US dance charts, along with topping the charts in Syria and Turkey.

• Young Adam, 2002, a score for the David MacKenzie film for which David gathered together a comprehensive group of musicians from Scottish bands; Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Appendix Out amongst others. David also worked with director Stephen Frears composing the song "Glass Concrete and Stone" for his film Dirty Pretty Things.

Somewhere around 2002 Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. About a year later, in 2003, Talking Heads released a lovely boxed set which includes a DVD of all the band's videos. In 2005 a Brick was released with the complete studio catalog on dualdisc with previously unreleased audio and video material.

• Grown Backwards, Spring 2004 release and tour.

• Here Lies Love, a project about Imelda Marcos with musical contributions from Fatboy Slim, premieres in Adelaide AUS in March 2006.

ART

David Byrne has been involved with photography and design since his college days and has been publishing and exhibiting his work for the past decade. Like his film and musical projects, his artwork is often described as elevating the mundane or the banal to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials to find the sacred in the profane. Byrne's works are about interiors, both physical and emotional, as much as exteriors.

Museum shows in Germany, Italy, and Japan have mixed these pieces with audio elements, acoustiguides, and sculptural elements. Since the beginning Byrne has mixed exhibitions with public art: billboards in Belfast and Toronto, subway posters in Stockholm, fly posters during the presidential election in NY, LA and Chicago and lightboxes in the streets of San Francisco and Sydney, Australia. More recently there was a 215-foot long flow chart covering the 5th Avenue side of Saks 5th Ave, multiple-choice questions on the Tokyo subways, an audio piece in the World Financial Center in NYC, PowerPoint installations in a building lobby on Times Square, and an audio installation in Stockholm that turned a building into a giant musical instrument.

Several books have appeared in recent years, each a kind of piece on its own. The first, Strange Ritual (Chronicle Press, 1995) mixed text and image in a notebook-type format. The second, Your Action World (Edimar, Italy, 1998 and Chronicle, 1999), was modeled after corporate reports and inspirational and motivational literature. The third book, The New Sins / Los Nuevos Pecados, looks like a bible and was created for the Valencia Biennial, where copies were placed anonymously in hotel room drawers. It was published by McSweeney's in the USA and by Faber & Faber in the UK, and there is a Bulgarian edition as well. Another book project, Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information (Steidl/PaceMacGill, 2003) focuses on Byrne's use of the presentation software PowerPoint as an art medium and contains a DVD of 5 PowerPoint presentations set to music. Byrne's most recent book, Arboretum, is a sketchbook facsimile of his "tree drawings"; it was published by McSweeney's in September 2006.

Byrne is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC.

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