Ever since David Byrne’s American Utopia tour came by a couple of years ago, I’ve looked to the former Talking Heads frontman as a model of charm and civility. Lord knows there are plenty of examples of men becoming grumpy, stubborn and cranky as they age. But as “Slippery People” reverberated around the Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff, and Byrne cavorted with his grey-suited, bare-footed, wireless marching band, I saw a useful counter-example.
Here was someone who had reconciled his contradictions; who had found a way to be intellectual but silly, provocative but generous, urbane but cosmic. It doesn’t matter how old you are, I remember thinking, as long as you remain relevant, engaged and open. Most of us could find comfort in that as we age — even if we somehow never got round to making “Fear of Music” in our twenties.
It was a teeny bit jarring, then, to find Talking Heads drummer and co-founder Chris Frantz painting his bandmate of 15 years as an unreconstructed autocrat, a monster, a Machiavellian manipulator. “It’s like he can’t help himself,” Frantz said in an interview last week. Byrne’s brain, he complained, “is wired in such a way that he doesn’t know where he ends and other people begin. He can’t imagine that anyone else would be important.”
Byrne was always seen as difficult in Talking Heads heyday (1977-1991) but Frantz insists that the more genial figure of recent years is an artful construct. “It’s true that his public image has changed,” he said: “But friends of mine assure me that he hasn’t. I think he probably just decided that he could catch more bees with honey.”
The charge sheet is laid out in amusingly petty detail in Frantz’s memoir, Remain in Love — the title referring to Frantz’s long marriage to the Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth, rather than any affection towards the band’s frontman. At a student group art show, Byrne moved all of his paintings to the front, reducing everyone else to supporting players. He mocked Frantz for his wealthy parents but turned out to come from a pretty comfortable background himself. He repeatedly neglected to credit his bandmates for bits of song that they wrote. He was bitter and dismissive about Weymouth and Frantz’s side-project Tom Tom Club (“Well, that’s merely commercial music…”).
Why didn’t they play Live Aid? “Oh, that’s right. By 1984, David had decided that Talking Heads, one of the world’s great touring bands, should stop performing live.” And so on. One reviewer has likened Frantz’s book to a photo album “in which someone has cut all the heads off an estranged lover”.
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