David Byrne

David Byrne plays Edinburgh Playhouse on 21 July 2026. Singer, guitarist and songwriter first heard at New York’s CBGB with Talking Heads, Byrne has spent the years since tracing connections between new wave, art rock, post-punk and pop that borrows from Afro-Latin traditions, funk and electronic textures. Early solo steps like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with Brian Eno and Rei Momo set a taste for hybrid forms; later albums such as Grown Backwards and American Utopia mark a path from orchestral arrangements to a more direct, rhythm-led format.

Across records and stages, collaboration is a constant. He reunited with Eno for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today and teamed up with St. Vincent on Love This Giant, while work for film, dance and musical theatre continues to shape how he thinks about performance. In recent years he has brought choreography and mobile ensembles into the concert space, aligning movement with rhythm without losing the clarity of the songs. This date in Edinburgh draws together that trajectory in a live setting, often moving between the Talking Heads catalogue and the varied angles of his solo work.