In 2012 Prog stated the case for regarding Talking Heads as a progressive band. Not least was the presence of Frank Zappa, David Bowie and King Crimson collaborator Adrian Belew – although, as he recalled, tensions were already spilling over when he arrived.
The first time most people heard of Talking Heads was 1977, when the funk noir four – David Byrne, Chris Frantz, his girlfriend and later wife Tina Weymouth, plus former Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers member Jerry Harrison – emerged out of New York’s CBGB scene.
To say that they stood out next to their peers the Ramones, Suicide, Television, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group and Richard Hell’s Voidoids – would be to do understatement a disservice.
They might have looked like the most unprepossessing students, but there was an intensity to frontman Byrne that lent the band a so-normal-they’re-disturbing air. It made Psycho Killer, their most famous song, seem virtually autobiographical. Or, as Byrne put it in an interview in 1992: “Looking at old videos of us, it’s like three normal kids backing up this maniac.”
Even in an era that threw up Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, Byrne was unusual, appearing to teeter on that fine line between genius and madness. Discussing it today, Weymouth says: “People would ask, ‘Is David Byrne a genius or a moron?’ I wanted to nip that ‘moron’ bit in the bud, so it was better to say ‘genius.’ The truth is somewhere in between.”
For 1980 album Remain In Light – arguably their finest foray into (out of this) world music – the band accommodated extra musicians such as keyboardist Bernie Worrell and guitarist Adrian Belew. Frantz talks up those sessions now, but at the time there were rumours of dissent in the ranks as the other three found themselves increasingly treated like Byrne’s backing band.
Did Belew, an outsider, detect animosity? “Not in the studio, because Chris and Tina weren’t there when I played my parts,” he says. It was on tour later that he was “privy to the in-fighting and questions as to who should be credited for what.” He adds: “I just tried to remain neutral and have fun. Which it was, a lot of the time.”
Weymouth recalls “some temper tantrums” as relations broke down. “David had a lot of those when he got to be a star,” she says. “Fame overwhelmed him.” But she admits: “It wasn’t a sane time in our lives.”
Is it true that Weymouth asked Belew to replace Byrne? “Yes,” says the guitarist. “Chris and Tina raised the question. But that would have been very destructive for the band. You couldn’t replace David, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. It came out of Tina’s anxiety.”
There wouldn’t be another Heads album until 1983’s Speaking In Tongues, and thereafter only two more: 1985’s Little Creatures and 1988’s Naked (that is, unless you count 1986’s pseudo-soundtrack True Stories as an official band release).
They all saw a scaling back in terms of ambition and experimentation, but they did make the Heads more popular than ever as songs such as Road To Nowhere and Burning Down The House made them early stars of MTV.
Those hits also saw Byrne and the others become increasingly estranged as it became apparent he intended to go solo. “Was there tension?” Frantz reflects. “Only because David had plans outside Talking Heads and he wasn’t keeping us abreast of what they were.”
He continues: “It’s just one of those things. We had a wonderful chemistry, but nothing lasts.”
Weymouth adds: “We just have to be glad there was no loss of life – nobody was killed in the creation of a Talking Heads record.”
