The four members of Talking Heads reunited to launch their pop-up radio station on SiriusXM earlier this week with an extensive conversation with Este Haim.
The station will play nothing but music by the band and their various spin-off projects and solo work from now until October 31.
The idea of the four Heads appearing together would have been surprising even just a few years ago – Chris Frantz was especially critical of Byrne both in his memoir Remain In Love and in interviews he and Tina Weymouth have given over the years. But in front of an audience in New York, they seemed relaxed in each other’s company and spoke about what set the band apart from others.
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According to Frantz, it was because they add “an undeniably really interesting chemistry”. Expanding on this, he said: “Yes, David was the primary lyricist and, I guess you could say, composer, but we all worked really hard on those songs. We didn’t just come in and play them easily. We always tried to go for the artistic thing.”
The band came up via the CBGBs scene of the mid-1970s, and they recalled the first time they were accused of ‘selling out’ by the punk purists on that scene: as early as their debut single, when they decided to put some un-punk-like instrumentation on its B-side, New Feeling. “We thought, ‘Let’s put horns on. And maybe we’ll sound more like Al Green or a Stax record or something like that,’” remembered Jerry Harrison.
“I listened to it the other day, and it’s really delightful,” the guitarist said of the track. “People down at CBGB’s, though, in 1976, when they heard it, they said, ‘Oh, Talking Heads are selling out. They put horns on their record.”
Later on in the discussion, Harrison talked about how at the time they were always looking to take their music forward. “Every time we made something, it was like we wanted to progress, to change,” he said. “I think one of our most important things, we always set out to create new challenges. We always created, particularly on the first four records, every record had a different process”
“Maybe this came from the art world,” he mused, “is that if you want it to be different, don’t do it exactly the same way as you did the last thing. And I think that most people, well, in a studio, you know, you mic up, it is the same.”
Byrne also added that he still prefers to look forward rather than back, though: “It’s very, it’s kind of surprising how this stuff has kind of stood the test of time, that it keeps finding a new audience.”
Talking Heads Radio can be heard via the SiriusXM app until 31 October.
