A short history of Talking Heads

A look inside one of the most fascinating bands of all time

There were a lot of artists pushing a lot of boundaries in the late 1970s and through the '80s.

Then there was Talking Heads, a band so innovative, so boundary-pushing, so genre-defying that we still haven’t seen another band quite like them.

Listen to the Talking Heads J Files with Richard Kingsmill above

Across eight excellent albums, these New Yorkers embraced traditional and futuristic sounds. They played with rhythm and technology. They wrote memorable pop classics and mind-bending sonic explorations.

They might have been weird, but they were somehow able to sell that weirdness to a wide audience. They opened up the minds of those who were willing to listen and sneakily crawled into those of the people who weren't.

Here is just a very small part of the story of one of modern music's most fascinating and enduring bands.

People Like Us

Let's begin by acknowledging that both neither the music, nor the artistic and cultural impact of Talking Heads can easily be expressed with words.

Yes, that sounds like an almighty copout at the beginning of an article that aims to examine at least a small part of their legacy.

But even the band's mercurial frontman David Byrne acknowledges that his art is something best experienced and felt, rather than talked about.

"I think people understand [my work], for the most part, intuitively. But when they try and put that into words or explain what it is, then they get tongue-tied," he told Classic FM's Margaret Throsby in 2002.

This is coming from a man who penned a 352-page tome called How Music Works. A hefty omnibus collecting his thoughts on everything from composition to the economics of music.

He's not afraid to talk about music on any level, but he acknowledges that his own can be tough to dissect.

Of course plenty of artists believe this to be true of their work. So what makes Talking Heads' case any stronger?

Perhaps it's the diversity of their material?

They have hits. Big, perfect pop hits. 'Burning Down The House', 'Psycho Killer', 'And She Was', 'Road To Nowhere'… Taken on these songs alone, Talking Heads are practically a classic rock band.

"I look back at it as us being on the fringe of mainstream," Byrne told Throsby.

"We worked within a pop song format. So occasionally, almost by accident, something we did might fit in to the mainstream and might be accepted as being acceptable and enjoyable by a mainstream audience or radio or whatever.

"Other things we did obviously were not gonna fit in. But it was almost not by design, it was almost by accident. Our sensibility encompassed some things that were mainstream and some things that were definitely not.

"We were caught up in the punk movement, which we kept denying at the time. Saying 'we're not! We're not!' but all the publicity we were getting along with all the other groups didn't do us any harm."

There is of course more to Talking Heads than that handful of crossover tracks. So much more.

There is the deep groove of 'Life During Wartime', the uneasy glissandos of 'This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)' and the decidedly unsoulful retelling of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River' – all of which have a differing degree of familiarity and popularity among certain audiences.

Then there is the gargantuan 1980 record Remain In Light. A piece of work so ambitious from a band so fractured that it was either going to make or break them. It strengthened them, but very nearly went the other way.

The band brought on six extra musicians to flesh out their ideas – including guitarist Adrian Belew (Frank Zappa, David Bowie) – and convinced producer Brian Eno to write, perform and produce the album.

They even got rapidly rising star Robert Palmer to play percussion.

Its deeply rhythmic Afrofunk dance party meets crazed street evangelist vibe simply should not have worked.

Certainly not given it was cooked up and performed by a bunch of white American arty-types, with a producer famous for ambient music and a guitarist whose squealing, impressionistic prog-rock solos sounded completely alien.

"I like to throw myself into a difficult position and then work my way out of it," Byrne told Molly Meldrum on Countdown in 1981.

"I got a lot of ideas from listening to evangelists on the radio here. They really use language in a very different way than the way that I was brought up to use it. That was inspiring to me, to hear language used in a different way."

Musically, it remains a revelation. At once a perfect snapshot of a rapidly changing time in music and an enduring example of their pop genius.

But it was a hard sell.

"It sounded too black for white radio and too white for black radio," David Byrne told Rolling Stone in 1989.

"Remain in Light was the worst-selling Talking Heads record ever," drummer Chris Frantz said in the same piece.

Despite its initial commercial struggle, Byrne has always considered it to be a significant record in the band's development.

"Remain In Light was critically well received, but I think it was also kind of a creative breakthrough for the band and I," he told triple j's Zan Rowe in 2009.

That Rolling Stone article, which celebrates the record as the fourth best of the 1980s, is an essential read. Not just to understand Remain In Light, but the complexity of Talking Heads as a musical entity as a whole.

There was fighting, intellectualisation, misremembered (or perhaps misunderstood) emotions, and passion for an artistic goal that no one could clearly identify.

"We don't always know what we're doing," Tina Weymouth said of the album's striking cover. "We often just get excited, put something down and say, 'Oh, neat.'"

Perhaps we can't accurately convey the significance of Talking Heads because sometimes it just gets so damn weird that we can't even begin to imagine where these ideas came from and how the band plucked up the courage to execute them.

That weirdness is regularly credited to the art school credentials of the band's members. Each of the members of the band found themselves in art school at one time or another, though Byrne dismissed its influence at the time.

"I think [art students] are the kind of people who couldn't hack it in regular college," Byrne told Meldrum. "Art school is just the easiest alternative."

But on RN's Into The Music in 2002, Byrne was more generous about the impact of their education.

"Three of the members of Talking Heads went to art school. We came out of that background which definitely did affect what we did I think."

Byrne's lyrics are the most immediate signifier of the band's oddness. While he has conceded that they have meaning he (surprise!) finds it tough to talk about.

"I think they do mean things but I don't stop to analyse it while I'm doing it," Byrne told Bill Leak on Radio National in 2002.

"To the ear, they sound okay. People sing along to a lot of the tunes I've written in the past. But a lot of them really don't mean a whole hell of a lot. They just feel right."

"I often deal with commonplace things, or things that might be overlooked," he told Into The Music.

"Then I reinterpret them or talk about something that's very small as if it's very big and important."

If he could clearly articulate what his work means, Byrne wouldn't have a need to make it.

"If you could put what you do into words then you wouldn't feel the need to make it as music, or an image, or something else, you'd just say it," he told Throsby.

"Then you come to a place like this and you're asked 'Okay, instead of making music, put it into words'."

This profound, indefinable strangeness extended well beyond the band's music.

The band's live show was widely praised, though much was made of their rigid and emotionally distant, stage presence. But that part wasn't by design. They were nervous. 

"That was part and parcel of our enigmatic charisma, was that we were terribly nervous," Weymouth told Richard Kingsmill in 2000.

"In fact, it was our motto: get nervous. I don't think we even perform well if we don't. We have to get nervous."

Their video clips – a new artform in themselves – were always inventive, entertaining and completely beyond the creative capabilities of most.

There is 'Road To Nowhere's time-lapse of middle America, the home movie screening of 'This Must Be The Place' and the karaoke bar romp of 'Wild Wild Life', which stars John Goodman and Meat Loaf!

Then there's the stilted and strange choreography of David Byrne's preacher character in 'Once In a Lifetime'. One of the defining music video moments of the 1980s and still completely incomprehensible to this day.

Byrne, who directed a number of these videos, brought his visual nous to the stage for the filming of the band's celebrated 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.

He performs dressed in a suit that gets progressively bigger as the show progresses. By the time the band are almost finished their set, the suit is absurdly large.

During one of the moments in the film when Byrne interviews himself, he justifies his clothing decision as so.

"I wanted my head to appear smaller and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger, because music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head."

Speaking to Time magazine in 2014, Byrne gave a clearer rationale.

"I was in Japan in between tours and I was checking out traditional Japanese theater — Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku — and I was wondering what to wear on our upcoming tour," he said.

"A fashion designer friend (Jurgen Lehl) said in his typically droll manner, 'Well David, everything is bigger on stage.' He was referring to gestures and all that, but I applied the idea to a businessman's suit."

More Songs About...

Talking Heads first toured Australia in June 1979 and it was an exciting time for the band.

They'd already experienced great success with their first two records and were on the brink of releasing their third, Fear Of Music, just weeks after the tour's conclusion.

But they arguably hadn't reached their zenith yet. They were experimenting with new sounds, new moods and new ways of making music and were on the verge of bringing their sonic explorations into the mainstream.

While they were here, drummer Chris Frantz and frontman David Byrne came in to Double J to pick a few songs and talk about their favourite music at the time.

Their choices said a lot about the music they were making at the time, as well as the music that was soon to come from Talking Heads.

Well, Frantz spoke. Byrne sat quietly in the corner resting his voice for the show that night.

Fela Kuti – 'Water No Get Enemy'

"He's just one of our favourites. Sometimes, I mean, we don't listen to that kind of music all the time," Frantz said.

"Eno saw a movie of Fela Ransome Kuti and Africa 70 doing a performance in their native Nigeria. The funny thing about the movie was that there was a monsoon type of rainstorm happening at the time and the roof of the building was leaking.

"All the musicians – playing electric guitars – and Fela himself – who is a showman, sort of an African James Brown – were dancing around in a foot and a half of water. The crowd is surging forward and everyone's getting very excited, all up to their knees in mud and water.

"Not something that happens at our concerts."

Kuti would go on to be one of the band's biggest influences on their breakthrough 1980 album Remain In Light.

David Bowie – 'African Night Flight'

Frantz mentions that Bowie's 1979 album Lodger, which had just been released, had grown on him after a few listens. 

"It sounds good to me. It's funny, we were looking for producers a few months ago and we got to hear it, because we were talking to Tony Visconti. We ended up working again with Eno on our new record but we were checking some other people out.

"The first time I heard it, I dunno maybe I was just nervous at the time, but I thought 'I don't like this very much'. But now, as I listen to it, I like it more and more."

The Normal – 'Warm Leatherette'

"This song was very popular last winter in New York City at this new place called the Mudd Club. They have a doorman who stands there and picks out the weirdest people and lets them in. Sometimes they're not that weird, sometimes they're just people he knows are cool – like myself.

"It's a great place and I remember this song was very popular. They play it like over and over for an hour straight.

"It's one of those clubs that some nights it's just like entering another world when you go there. You're just suddenly transported to another world. Other nights it might not be that great. But there have been nights where there've been all these famous rock stars there, all these famous artists, beautiful girls, lots of drugs – things like that. It's quite a scene.

"I guess it's the kinda place what we imagine Max's Kansas City was like when the Velvet Underground would play in the old days, before our time."

Kraftwerk – 'The Model'

"It's good driving music. When we tour Europe we often times play that kind of music in the car as we're riding along because it somehow enhances the scenery.

"It enhances the trip. I'm not an expert on it. Kraftwerk is really the main proponent that I'm hip to."

Garland Jeffries – 'Wild In The Streets'

"He's one of those people that is well known around New York as being a really strong singer-songwriter type.

"I know that he and Lou Reed are friends and often times collaborate, or have in the past. Lou Reed seems to win and lose friends all the time."

Memories Can’t Wait: the post-Talking Heads careers

David Byrne

Where do we start?

Byrne's post-Talking Heads career has been incredibly fruitful. Musically speaking, he's been all over the map (sometimes literally) with classical, electronic, South American, rock, pop and opera all factoring into his various solo releases.

"There are some genres I have not dipped my toes into and probably never will," he told Richard Kingsmill in 2002.

"I don't want to appear to be clever or that I'm showing off, it's part of my listening experience so it naturally seeps into the writing that I do."

Given his headstrong leadership and arguably overbearing control of Talking Heads almost caused the band to split before their prime, it's somewhat surprising to see how important collaboration has been for Byrne over the past couple of decades.

He's made records with St. Vincent, Brian Eno and Fatboy Slim, and featured the likes of Kirsty MacColl, Morcheeba, Lambchop's Kurt Wagner and Mexican band Café Tacuba on his solo albums.

He's also appeared on tracks from De La Soul, Anna Calvi, 10,000 Maniacs, Dirty Projectors and Arcade Fire, and written for Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the TV series Big Love and a series of acclaimed film soundtracks.

He's also had a hand in releasing a stack of really great records through his Luaka Bop label.

Music from all across the world has found a home on the label, including the Brazilian psych of Os Mutantes, the exploratory synth funk of Nigeria's William Onyeabor, the almost forgotten genius of American soul man Shuggie Otis and the mind-bending electro-jazz of the UK's Floating Points.

He has also released a heap of compilations of great music from non-western countries over the years. Just don't call it world music.

Tom Tom Club

Not strictly a post-Talking Heads concern, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz started Tom Tom Club as a casual side-project in the early-'80s.

But the immense success of the early singles in the burgeoning dance scene meant that it became something far more serious.

"Commercial success was not part of our experience, so we didn't expect it at all," Weymouth told Richard Kingsmill on triple j in 2000.

"It was a tremendous shock. It made me shyer than ever. I had been very shy with Talking Heads.

"I couldn't really understand it. Everybody had given us reason to believe that the other members of Talking Heads were doing legitimate solo records and what we were doing was just a vanity project."

Their song 'Genius Of Love' was a massive hit on the charts, but also became a key piece of hip hop history after becoming one of the most sampled tracks in hip hop.

Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, 2Pac, Busta Rhymes, Ice Cube and even Mariah Carey have all used it in their music.

The band has continued to make records, albeit sporadically, with their most recent EP Downtown Rockers out in 2012.

The couple have also contributed to Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's Gorillaz project, with Weymouth voicing Noodle and Frantz providing both vocals and percussion.

The Heads

One of the more controversial post-Talking Heads side-projects, The Heads were made up of the core members of Talking Heads, minus frontman David Byrne.

They released just one album, perhaps a little cheekily titled No Talking, Just Head. This audacity didn't quit go down so well with Byrne who sued the band for evoking the image of Talking Heads a little too strongly. They settled out of court.

The record itself should have been amazing. In Byrne's stead the band had vocalists such as Michael Hutchence, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, Shaun Ryder and Gordan Gano. But, as these things can tend to, it fell a little flat.

Production

Each Talking Heads member now has a number of production credits to their name. The range of music the four core members have worked with is typically diverse

It shouldn't be a surprise that the band members went into production. Their music has provided a blueprint for so much pop, indie and dance music of the past couple of decades. Plus, they've always had designs on getting behind the scenes.

"I think we're almost at the point where we can produce our own records if we want to," Chris Frantz told Chris Winter in 1979. "And get all that money that producers normally get. It seems like it's a touchy subject, production."

Jerry Harrison's production credits feature some hugely commercially successful records from a wide variety of acts, including Foo Fighters, No Doubt, Live, The Verve Pipe, Crash Test Dummies and The Von Bondies.

During Talking Heads' reign, David Byrne helped The B-52s with their 1982 EP Mesopotamia. It should have been a triumph, but it ended up being merely a footnote in both artists' career.

"If I had to talk about it, I would say that I think the production I did was pretty good, but the mix was not so good. It could have been given a sparklier mix," Byrne told Bill Leak on Radio National in 2002.

"If I'm working with another musician, depending on what they do, I just want them to do what they do best and see if I can still do what I do, but work it into what they do," he said. "It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does."

Byrne's relatively limited production work has also seen him work with Fun Boy Three (featuring three former members of The Specials) and Geggy Tah, as well as much of his own solo work.

Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz's produced each of their Tom Tom Club records. They also produced the 1992 Happy Mondays album Yes Please! Perhaps the less said about that the better.

Talking Heads Reunion

The band were last together to perform a short set to coincide with their induction to the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame in 2002.

"I think there's gonna be some awkward moments," Byrne admitted to Kingsmill a few months before the ceremony. "But we're all talking – thanks to email – and trying to figure out how we're going to do it."

A couple of years earlier, Weymouth told Kingsmill that the band had remained open to reconciling with Byrne

"We gave him a face-saving opportunity to return to the band when we started the Heads project," she said on triple j in 2000.

"His response to that was to slap us with a big old, meritless suit. So, there's no figuring that one out.

"We saw him a year and a half ago at the re-release of Stop Making Sense at the San Francisco Film Festival.

"He was in a different room. The band did their interviews in one room and David was in another room. I guess we got the message."

The root of the animosity is no doubt complex and personal, though the way Weymouth spoke about the mood in the band following their split sheds some light on why they're so unhappy with each other.

"It was really sad for us," she told Kingsmill. "We went into a massive depression. There was a terrible sense of loss and bereavement without closure for many, many years. But we're past that now. We're moving on."

While these days we know that we should never say never, a Talking Heads reunion is up there with The Smiths. It's just so far beyond likely that we wouldn't dare ever get our hopes up.

"I really don't think so," Byrne told Zan in 2009. "Our musical interests have diverged a lot. And there's been some bad blood. Sometimes people get past that… but I don't think so."

As the saying goes: at least we have the music.