Pete Byrne, the shaggy-headed lead singer of the pop duo Naked Eyes, who rode high during the MTV-fueled second British Invasion with buoyant hits like “Always Something There to Remind Me” and “Promises, Promises,” died on Sept. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 74.
Jim Merlis, a spokesman for the band, said Mr. Byrne died of a brief illness, but did not give further details.
Naked Eyes, with Byrne as lead singer and Rob Fisher on keyboards, formed in Bath, England, in the early 1980s. Mr. Fisher was also Byrne’s songwriting partner. The duo grew out of Neon, a group that also included Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, who went on to form Tears for Fears. Neon failed to catch fire.
Signing with the powerhouse British label EMI, they cut their 1983 debut album, released as “Burning Bridges” in Britain, at Abbey Road Studios.
Their first single was a lush electro-pop reworking of a chestnut familiar to the parents of the MTV generation: Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me,” as it is officially known, which was a No. 1 hit in Britain in 1964 for Sandie Shaw and also yielded memorable versions for Lou Johnson and Dionne Warwick.
“We felt that if you can put your own sound on a song,” Mr. Byrne told Electronics & Music Maker magazine in 1983, “that’s just as valid as doing an original.”
But the single stalled at No. 59, and the album failed to make a splash in Britain.
To Mr. Byrne, the problem was that the label “was really into all the hair groups — you know, Kajagoogoo, Haircut 100, that sort — and Rob and I were, like, kind of the antithesis of that,” he said in a 2009 interview with Miami New Times. “We basically considered ourselves to be songwriters who used synthesizers to produce our music.”
The group fared better in America, where MTV had swallowed the record industry whole by 1983. Given that music videos were basically TV commercials for songs, it was little wonder that the emergent wave of British keyboard bands, with their jingle-worthy ditties and pinwheel fashion, exploded in the new medium.
Naked Eyes refused to play the fashion game associated with bands like A Flock of Seagulls and pushed by marketing teams. “If I listened to these people,” Mr. Byrne said in a 1997 interview with the Swedish writer Jonas Wårstad, “I’d end up wearing a spandex kilt and Robin Hood shoes.”
But with their effervescent synth-pop sound, irresistible hooks and English accents, Naked Eyes were soon saturating MTV alongside Human League, Thomas Dolby and other British artists.
“Always Something There to Remind Me” rocketed to No. 8 in the United States in 1983. Their first album, titled simply “Naked Eyes” in America, yielded another indelible hit, “Promises, Promises,” that reached No. 11 the same year.
“We were just in the right place at the right time with everything,” Mr. Byrne told CBS News in 2013.
Peter James Byrne was born on June 9, 1952, in Islington, North London, the fourth of six children of James Byrne and Olive (Salusbury) Byrne, who both worked in retail.
He left secondary school at 16 to study art in Essex, and later moved to Bath, where he became a fixture on the local music scene.
Mr. Byrne’s relationship with his future professional partner began one night when Mr. Fisher was being berated by a female singer in his band. Mr. Byrne intervened, and the two “retired to a local hostelry to debate the pros and cons of being in a band,” he told Mr. Wårstad.
“Four years later,” he added, “we were an overnight success.”
That success proved brief. “When the Lights Go Out,” off their first album, hit No. 37 in the U.S. Their follow-up album, “Fuel for the Fire” (1984), was a commercial disappointment, but did yield the group’s last Top 40 hit, “(What) In the Name of Love.”
The pair soon parted ways. “After living and writing together 24 hours a day for four or five years, we needed a break from each other,” Mr. Byrne said in a 2002 interview with the online magazine NewBeats.
Mr. Fisher died in 1999 after surgery for bowel cancer. Mr. Byrne continued to tour and record under the Naked Eyes name, releasing two albums, “Fumbling With the Covers” (2007) and “Disguise the Limit” (2021). He released another album, “The Real Illusion,” under his own name in 2001.
His marriage to the poet and artist Elena Karina Byrne ended in divorce in 2015. He is survived by three children, Merlin, Dylan and Chloe; three sisters, Eileen, Sandy, Carol; and a brother, Steve.
While the music world remembers Mr. Byrne’s legacy as that of a synth-pop pioneer, he expressed pride in another accomplishment in his interview with Mr. Wårstad: the inclusion of “Always Something There to Remind Me” on the 1999 compilation album “The Love Songs of Burt Bacharach.”
“At last, I share a CD with Perry Como and Tom Jones,” he said. “My mother is very proud.”
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