With the addition of Jerry Harrison and, finally, the big band, I would go for the deeper tones of reggae. “In my own playing,” she told me, “I was trying to pay attention to both melody and rhythm as a means to tie together the drums and David’s extremely bright, no mid-range guitar and vocals. Our parts were equally about contrast as they were about blending.'Īnd this time there was no question about who had written the songs: the band jammed them in the studio, sometimes swapping instruments, hitting on an idea and playing it over and over like “human samplers”. 'The spikier David played, the more I attempted to make my parts as sinuous and funky as possible.

'For serious or twisted song subjects, I enjoyed juxtaposing rather humorous parts and vice versa,' said Tina. Talking Heads could seem arty and cerebral but the music was joyful, daft and trancey. Lyrically paranoid, claustrophobic and anxious, the music of Remain In Light is frequently jubilant and celebratory, and the tension between the two created something genuinely original. We didn’t get it quite right, but in missing, we ended up with something new.” “Our process led us to something with some affinity to Afro-funk, but we got there the long way round, and of course our version sounded slightly off. We deconstructed everything as we began to use the process described above, and then as the music evolved, we began to realize we were in effect reinventing the wheel. “We were listening to African pop music,” Byrne told the Library of Congress (opens in new tab) in 2017, “like Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé, and some field recordings. She invents every part anew - this was one reason Talking Heads sounded so unique.” To this day, Tina never ever plays the predictable thing.

“Tina had not played rock and roll before Talking Heads,” Frantz wrote, “and did not have a repertoire of standard blues and rock bass licks in her musical vocabulary.

In his 2020 biography, Remain In Love (opens in new tab), Chris Frantz revealed that Byrne wanted to fire Weymouth shortly before their first album, in frustration at what he saw as her lack of progress on the bass – at that point, Weymouth had only been playing for a year. Byrne made Weymouth audition not once, but three times and from the very start there were arguments over songwriting credits: the only hit from 1979’s Fear of Music was Life During Wartime, a track that began life as a jam between Frantz and Weymouth, but was originally credited to Byrne alone (something that has subsequently been rectified). The history of Talking Heads is littered with inter-band feuds and bitterness. Tina Weymouth in 1980, the year Remain In Love was released, with a Höfner Club bass (Image credit: Chris Walter/Getty)

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