Where did rock star David Byrne live in Hamilton as a boy? The internet has answers

It’s not clear if a young David Byrne found himself living in a shotgun shack as a child in 1950s Hamilton, but his former address is now a house, in the middle of the street.

Byrne, the singer, songwriter and filmmaker who fronted the late 1970s and ’80s new wave band Talking Heads, falls into a category of creatives whose connection to Canada might have fallen into a memory hole. Byrne is rightfully labelled as Scottish-American, since he was born in Dumbarton, Scotland and came of age on the U.S. eastern seaboard in Maryland. However, for about six years of his childhood, from age 2 through 8, Byrne’s parents resided in Hamilton, while his electrical-engineer father Thomas Byrne was posted here with Westinghouse, a North American manufacturing giant.

Fast forward to the first Thursday in March of 2022, and a thread on r/Hamilton that queried about where Byrne might have lived, some six decades before he was starring on Broadway in the Spike Lee-directed “American Utopia.” Well, a Redditor’s pore through the 1957 Hamilton directory, when Byrne was five years old, shows a listing for a couple named Thomas and Emily Byrne who lived at 51 Audrey St., and Thomas’s profession was listed as, wait for it, an electrical engineer at Westinghouse.

Byrne has acknowledged his Hamiltonian roots. In 1994, when he was performing in Toronto a few years after Talking Heads broke up, he told the audience that he had lived in Hamilton, but joked that his childhood home had been torn down to make way for condominiums.

He mentioned living in Hamilton during a solo show in Toronto in ‘94, that the house is now a condo.

— Emmett Pearce (@pleasure_radio) November 18, 2020

That might have been some of the rocker’s characteristic wryness. A Google Street view search shows there is a single-family dwelling at 51 Audrey St., which as of February 2021.

Byrne, who will turn 70 years old in May, formed Talking Heads in New York in 1975. Over their 16 years together, they created three seminal tracks — “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime” and “Once In A Lifetime” — that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included on a list of 500 songs that shaped the genre.

Forty-five years after being included on the group’s eponymous 1977 debut, “Psycho Killer” remains such a cultural touchstone that it is a go-to for period pieces that want to fix the viewer in that time period.  For instance, two suspense-thriller streaming series, Amazon Prime’s Hunters and Netflix’s Mindhunter, used “Psycho Killer.”

The multitalented Byrne also built enough name recognition in the ’90s to achieve that decade’s ultimate stamp of approval — being referenced in The Simpsons. In the 1993 episode “Homer Goes To College,” Byrne is one of the “famous nerds” that Lisa rhymes off to her father.

That might not have bothered Byrne. Ten years later, he appeared as himself on the animated comedy. A Simpsonized Byrne walked into Moe’s Tavern, which led to him recording a version of Homer Simpson’s “delightfully cruel hate song,” entitled “Everybody Hates Ned Flanders.”

Part of a wave of immigration

So way back when, what brought the Byrnes to Hamilton for a spell? Pardoning the presentism, but opportunity and relative acceptance played a part.

Post-Second World War Great Britain was fraught with industrial decline and high inflation, which limited opportunities for engineers such as Thomas Byrne. David Byrne’s parents also felt social pressure due to their mixed-faith marriage, since his dad was Catholic while his mum was Presbyterian.

Meantime, Canada was experiencing a newfound postwar prosperity and needed more experienced engineers. The comedian and former late-night talk-show host Craig Ferguson once joked-theorized in his memoir, “American on Purpose,” that Scots developed an aptitude for engineering out of necessity, since buildings had to be strong enough to withstand the gale-force winds in the Scottish highlands.

Bringing it back to Byrne, spending his early years in Hamilton is mostly a footnote. In 1994, in fact, he mentioned Hamilton when an interviewer from “Rolling Stone” magazine asked him what was the least glamorous place he had ever lived.

“I think a lot of places I lived — Glasgow; Hamilton, Ontario; and Baltimore — at the time were all industrial towns,” he said. “They’ve since spruced up their images, but they were pretty unglamorous industrial heaps.”

In that interview, Byrne mentioned being influenced creatively by attending a Pink Floyd concert. Hamilton, of course, has its own unique history with Pink Floyd.

The city, of course, has claim to homegrown stars such as Thomas Wilson, The Arkells and Teenage Head.

There is awareness in Hamilton that another rock-and-roll frontman, Ian Astbury of The Cult, developed his musical sensitivities as a Glendale Secondary School student in the 1970s before moving to England.

And some of Hamilton seeped into the sound and identify of Canada’s band, The Tragically Hip. While the Hip all grew up and formed a group in the Kingston, Ont., area — phrased that way since Gord Downie lived in nearby Amherstview until his teens — they have credited playing shows in east-end Hamilton clubs for helping them develop. (Fun footnote: Jay McKee, the head coach of the OHL’s Hamilton Bulldogs, is an alumnus of the same youth hockey association as Downie, and both won an Ontario title there during their boyhoods.)

And now, there is a little more knowledge of a famous musician’s experiences in Hamilton.