David Byrne

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Byrne was a founding member of the band Talking Heads. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, he emigrated first to Canada and then to the USA before the age of ten. He started playing in bands at school and, when art school didn't work out for him, he founded Talking Heads with a couple of friends. They played their first gig, opening for the Ramones, at the legendary New York club CBGB's, in June 1975. Eight studio albums later, cracks were beginning to show in the relations between band members, and by 1991 Talking Heads had officially split up. Since then, he has enjoyed a solo career, and also made films, published photographic books, composed scores for musicals, created art installations and written books. He has received an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score, as well as a Golden Globe and a Grammy, for his soundtrack to the 1987 film The Last Emperor. He and his fellow Talking Heads members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. He lives in New York and has a daughter in her late twenties from his 17 year marriage to Adelle Lutz. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	My cast away this week is the musician David Byrne.
0:52.0	Talking heads was his band through the 70s and 80s.
0:55.0	He occupied a central but skew-width position in pop culture, dislocated, witty, ambiguous and twitching.
1:02.0	Taking new wave, existential angst and fashioning it into catchy, chart-topper, psychokiller road to nowhere and burning down the house
1:09.0	are just a few of the band's best known hits.
1:12.0	But unlike so many of his contemporaries, his was not a talent that could easily be wrung out by the music business and left for dead.
1:19.0	In the ensuing decades, his works, scoring movies, writing books, staging art installations and most recently collaborating with neuroscientists,
1:27.0	points to a man with significant creative reach.
1:30.0	A beguilingly unconventional presence he has nonetheless captivated the establishment, collecting an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Grammy along the way.
1:39.0	He says,
1:40.0	For my whole life, I have attempted to make works that hover in the zone between the high and the low, the known and the unknown, the quotidian and the extraordinary.
1:48.0	I love to make art that doesn't and nine sit self as art.
1:52.0	And that of course includes pop music. So welcome.
1:55.0	Thank you to Lovely Island. I'm very happy that this massive sound system washed up on the beach.
2:02.0	It's not here. It's very lucky.
2:04.0	You've been making sounds and many other things for around about 40 years now.
	...

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