Recommendations of the Editorial team
An archive text from 2024.
From the beginning, the story of the Talking Heads was one of impending disintegration. This is as far as is known and was always confirmed by all musicians in interviews after the official dissolution in 1991. The reason for this is probably the behavior and self-image of singer David Byrne, who turned to his own projects early on and is said to have sometimes viewed his colleagues more as a means to an end.
Tina Weymouth, the band’s bassist and married to Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz (who most recently described his view of things in the autobiography “Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina”), now made it clear in a series of texts for the “Sunday Times” that because of David Byrne’s great insecurity from the start, a long half-life for the band from New York was not possible.
David Byrne some kind of Trumpist?
“I recently called David Byrne a Trumpist, which did not sit well with everyone,” Weymouth wrote. “What I meant was that, in my experience, everything with David is transactional – he uses you until he has no use for you anymore.”
The reason for this was that Byrne always looked for faults in others when he didn’t know what to do. “Chris and I loved him very much and we did our best to overlook these catastrophic character flaws, but it seemed obvious that Talking Heads couldn’t continue to exist.”
Weymouth continued: “In interviews, David always says he’s happy, and I’d like to believe that. But if he’s happy, why does he refuse to even mention Chris and me or Jerry? He calls us ‘people he used to play with’. Isn’t that strange? I’ve realized that people behave like animals. Some are like pigeons: beautiful and peaceful, like Chris. Unfortunately, some are cunning foxes too.”
Talking Heads: Reunion excluded
In his memoirs, Frantz suggested that the end of Talking Heads was a sad chapter. So Byrne is said to have simply stopped communicating with the rest of the band. At least Weymouth and Frantz still had their own project to work on, Tom Tom Club. There was at least a brief reunion in 2002, when the Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and came together again on stage for a few songs. Any attempts at further reunification were brushed off by Byrne, as Frantz writes.