1975-1991David ByrneVocals, guitar
Jerry HarrisonGuitar, keyboards
Tina WeymouthBass
Chris FrantzDrums
Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz met at the Rhode Island School of Design. Byrne was only a student for one year, but returned to campus to play with Frantz in a band called The Artistics. In 1974, Weymouth and Frantz graduated with degrees in painting, and the three of them moved into a skeevy apartment in the Lower East Side of New York City. Weymouth didn't join their band until 1975; they were a trio until adding Harrison, who didn't come on board until they had a record deal. He wasn't part of their first single, "Love Goes to Building on Fire."
Frantz and Weymouth started dating in 1972 and got married on June 18, 1977, a few months before the first Talking Heads album was released. They interrupted their honeymoon when the band got a last-minute offer to open for Bryan Ferry at the Bottom Line in New York City on June 23.
In 1981, the band members took on outside projects: Byrne scored the Twyla Tharp musical
The Catherine Wheel, Harrison released a solo album called
The Red and the Black, and Weymouth and Frantz formed a group called the Tom Tom Club, which had hits with "
Genius Of Love" and "
Wordy Rappinghood."
In a Songfacts
interview with Chris Frantz, he explained that they weren't planning to start a new band, but were encouraged to do so by their accountant, who told them they were low on cash.
"Talking Head" is a television term for a person, usually a newscaster, speaking on camera; a friend suggested it after seeing it in an issue of TV Guide magazine.
The name has another meaning as well: carnivals and other oddities events sometimes set up displays where a person's head appears to be placed on top of a box. These heads would sometimes tell fortunes, and were known as "Talking Heads."
There is no "The" in the name of the band. The name of the band is Talking Heads.
The famous Oxford band Radiohead got their name from the Talking Heads song "
Radio Head." They were previously called On A Friday.
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Suggestion credit:
Sebastian - Mt. Vernon, NY
Harrison graduated from Harvard, where he studied architecture. He was in a group called the Modern Lovers before joining Talking Heads.
When they met Lou Reed, who was a titan of the New York City art and music scene Talking Heads had entered, he quipped, "It's cool you have a chick in the band. Wonder where you got that idea?"
Reed was referring to his band The Velvet Underground, which had a female drummer, Maureen Tucker.
Byrne has a very unconventional voice and delivery, making him an unlikely frontman. His lyrics, singing and movement are part of a whole package that comes together when he performs. According to Chris Frantz, what we see on stage is an extension of his personality. "He got into music to get out of himself," Frantz wrote in his memoir Remain In Love. "When you played music with David you came to realize that his eccentricities were not an act."
The only cover song they ever recorded was Al Green's "
Take Me To The River," which was their first big hit. According to
drummer Chris Frantz, David Byrne was peeved when a song he didn't write became the hit, so he didn't let them record any more covers.
None of the band members are very imposing, so in their early years it was Weymouth who was assigned the task of getting payment from promoters after shows.
They come up in New York City with punk acts like the Ramones, but the "punk" label didn't suit them - it earned some press but hurt their chances of getting played on the radio. Their label boss, Seymour Stein, came up with a new term to describe their music: New Wave. That moniker proved more appealing to listeners looking for a more modern, refined sound.
David Byrne was born in Scotland and has lived in the US since he was eight. However, he only officially became an American in 2012 following an awkward conversation at a polling station. "I'd been occasionally voting before that," he admitted to The Guardian. "I naively thought it was legal and they never cross-checked. Then eventually they looked at my ID and said: 'You can't vote!' So I said OK, I've gotta go through this whole thing now."
David Byrne is an keen cyclist and he once designed a range of bike racks installed across New York.
