Where is Talking Heads singer David Byrne from?
New wave band Talking Heads were actually one of the founders of the thriving New York rock scene that coalesced around the CBGB club in Manhattan’s East Village during the mid-1970s, which included foundational punk acts Patti Smith, Television and the Ramones. But, like their contemporaries, Blondie and Talking Heads were never really that interested in making the three-chord rock and roll that typified punk rock.
They just happened to find themselves in a thriving artistic movement that proved inspirational to almost all the rock music which came after it, because they came to North America’s biggest city in search of a place to express themselves. Their leader, David Byrne brought fellow musician Chris Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth with him from Providence, Rhode Island, which is spitting distance from the tail end of New York’s Long Island.
The three of them had been studying art together at the Rhode Island School of Design, which is how they met. But, as the curious accent of his singing voice suggests, Byrne isn’t actually from Providence.
His characteristic, semi-swallowed vocals delivered with a half-closed mouth and over-accentuated “R”s, let on that there’s something not entirely American about his background. There’s definitely another nationality lurking in there somewhere.
So, what is Byrne’s nationality?
In fact, Byrne is from the United States, in the sense that he grew up just the other side of New York from Rhode Island, in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Yet that’s not where he hailed from originally.
Byrne’s family moved to Maryland when he was already in primary school so that his father could take a job as an engineer at one of the biggest electricity suppliers in the United States. They’d travelled down from the city of Hamilton in Canada, which is on the border with the US, having lived there for six years.
Prior to living in Canada, however, Byrne was born in Scotland, because both of his parents were native Scots. He was born in Dumbarton, a commuter town just outside Glasgow, which was the hometown of his father, Tom. His parents both enjoyed listening to fans of Scottish folk songs, which played a role in his musical development from an early age.
Because his father was from a Catholic background and his mother was Protestant, there were tensions between their families due to the sectarian divisions prevalent at the time within Glasgow, which had a large demographic of Irish immigrants. “I think they probably wanted to be free of all the mixed marriage religious stuff,” Byrne told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. “It was quite oppressive”.
When it was later put to him that it must be difficult to work out where home is, given that he grew up in three different countries and has both British and American citizenship, Byrne was sanguine in his response. Referencing the Talking Heads song ‘This Is the Place’, he replied, “Home is not a place; it’s the people you surround yourself with.” Spoken like a true child of the world.
