Promotion
Next month Talking Heads co-founders Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth will be appearing in a series of in-depth live interviews with journalist and writer Miranda Sawyer.
Titled Remain In Love, the shows will feature the pair, who formed Talking Heads with David Byrne in 1973, discussing their careers in music, their relationship and Frantz’s 2020 memoir of the same name.
UK dates are below and tickets are available HERE.
May 25th Sheldonian Theatre Oxford
Mat 27th Electric Ballroom Camden London
May 28th Brudenell Social Club Leeds
Speaking to MOJO in 2020, Weymouth and Frantz described meeting each other at The Rhode Island School of Design in 1973, becoming a couple and the original seeding and growth of the band that would become Talking Heads.
An early date involved the two, as Weymouth remembered, indulging in “a matchhead of crystal cocaine, uncut”. The subsequently super-chatty Frantz asked Weymouth if she would consider starting a band with him but she initially said no. “I think she felt that rock’n’roll was sort of a guy’s thing,” says Frantz, “that it was a boys’ club.”
“Rock’n’roll was all about decadence and men,” Weymouth agreed. “Men getting really sloppy and dirty and drinking and drugging too much. It was impossible that I could fit into that. I was a tomboy, but I wasn’t a man.”
Frantz hooked up through a mutual friend with David Byrne, a RISD dropout still hanging around campus, nicknamed ‘Mad Dave’, due to the “full Rasputin beard” and hand-me-down clothes he wore in Freshman year, and they formed The Artistics, the band that would become Talking Heads
“David was always, let’s just say, eccentric,” recalled Frantz. “All around RISD,” added Weymouth, “they were known as The Autistics.”
Not until 2012, in the pages of his How Music Works book, would Byrne diagnose himself with mild Asperger’s syndrome. “We all knew,” said Weymouth. “I mean, all of David’s friends knew.
He didn’t always have the full shilling, you might say, in terms of emotional intelligence or that sort of thing. But we loved him.”
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