Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and further collaborations with Gorillaz, Happy Mondays and more, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth need no introduction. Ahead of their UK tour for Frantz’s autobiography, Remain in Love, the long-reigning music duo sit down with Ewan Gleadow to talk Shaun Ryder, David Byrne, and their longevity in music.
Ewan: First of all, congratulations on Remain in Love. It was a delightful read, it must feel great to get that on tour now.
Chris Frantz: It does feel good, and in the month of May no less, which I’m told is very merry. I have this great publisher, White Rabbit Books, and they wanted me to come over to the UK and do a proper book tour, but I never got to do it because of Covid. So now we, Tina and I, have a chance to do a few speaking engagements with the fabulous Miranda Sawyer. We’re looking forward to it.
Tina Weymouth: Oh yeah, coming to the UK. It’ll be 10 years since we were last there.
Ewan: Quite a while, then, and you picked three very prestigious, historic venues. Leeds particularly with the Brudenell Club.
Tina: We love that place, we played there as Tom Tom Club, and it was the night before we did Glastonbury Festival. To be honest, it was more fun than Glastonbury.
Ewan: It’ll be great to be back in the UK, though, I’m sure. What can people expect from your speaking engagements?
Chris: Yes, we have some old friends from various bands and people that were just friends of friends. It’ll be nice to see them all again and have a cup of tea. Tina and I will be discussing various things prompted by the host, and answering questions. I haven’t heard what the questions might be but I think they’re going to be about Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club –
Tina: Happy Mondays, The Ramones.
Chris: Tina and I have a very long-standing relationship so I imagine there’ll be inevitable questions, like, how do you do it?
Ewan: I’ll not put the inevitable question to you, but if you could just talk me through the writing process of Remain in Love. A lot of musicians are reflecting on very lengthy, legacy-enduring careers. How did Remain in Love come about? The detail in there, those little pieces are often forgotten or misremembered by others.
Chris: Well I, fortunately, seem to be blessed with a pretty good memory. I’m knocking on wood because, you know, I’m not as young as I used to be. But I seem to have a pretty good handle on things. Tina was able to correct a few things that she remembered differently.
Tina: It just jogged your very good memory.
Chris: Yes, I was able to use Tina – in the early days for example, in 1977, when we toured the UK and Europe with Ramones, Tina was acting as our tour manager in those days. She kept date books, not really diaries, but…
Tina: Agendas.
Chris: Yeah, agendas. I was able to look at those and check if I was remembering things properly, and that was very helpful.
Tina: Itineraries would be shifted from what had been originally planned. We would have rerouted and stuff, so the agendas actually corrected a lot of things that, when you look on the internet, you would get the wrong information.
Ewan: Remain in Love, for me, does very well to show the major part you both had in forming not just Talking Heads but the influences of it.
Tina: Yeah, I mean actually Chris formed the band and brought each one of us together, including Jerry Harrison. With the bigger band, it became an idea that Jerry had, which was very welcome. We love those people.
Ewan: It started with The Artistics when you all met in college, is it easier to form a band when you all have the same common ground artistically? That riff off of one another appears easier.
Chris: I think so. I mean I would only start a band with people that I felt I had something artistically in common. With Talking Heads and also Tom Tom Club, we had really good chemistry, very productive. Everybody had a good work ethic. I remember Jerry Harrison said he never wore a watch until he joined Talking Heads. He noticed the rest of us were all wearing watches and we would be on time and where we were supposed to be. That was a first for him. He’d been in a few bands but evidently some of them never even knew what day it was.
Remain In Love – three intimate live on-stage interviews with co-founders and co-writers of the iconic bands Talking Heads & Tom Tom Club, namely Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz.
25 May 2023 – Shelodian Theatre, Oxford
27 May 2023 – Electric Ballroom, London
28 May 2023 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Book tickets for the Remain in Love tour here.
I think one thing that separated us from many of the other bands of our era is we had gone to art school, and it wasn’t just a hobby for us. We were being educated in the arts. Jerry was also in architecture school at Harvard University, and I think it’s safe to say we had a fairly intellectual point of view about our music than many of the other bands. That could also be a big drawback, I think, but fortunately for us, it was not.
Tina: Well, David Byrne, for instance, was terrified of that whole intellectual content, but I just made it very simple for everybody to understand those intellectual ideas are all about just that. Ideas. Then he got it.
Ewan: Speaking of that, and the legacy of yourselves, we’re nearing a decade from Downtown Rockers’ release under Tom Tom Club and 50 on from Talking Heads’ debut, 77. How does it feel to have that sort of legacy under your belt?
Chris: I’m very pleased with our legacy. I’m so happy. It seems like you can tell by streaming numbers, to a certain extent record sales too. Let’s face it, record sales are not what they used to be. But you can tell by the streaming data that it’s not just our peer group that continues to play Talking Heads, but also a younger group that maybe found us on Stranger Things or something like that, or just caught word of it. It’s very gratifying that younger people think it’s cool and want to play it and wear the t-shirt.
Ewan: A lot of that for my generation especially is seeing the crowd at the time. Obviously, the photo shoot you had with Andy Warhol, the legacy lives on of those that were around at the time for a new generation.
Chris: We were very fortunate to have been in New York at a really interesting time.
Ewan: And those times are mentioned in the book, too. Have you had the chance to tour much of it so far? I know you had a few dates in the US.
Chris: I’ve done a couple of live appearances, yes. One time back in June was so much fun, it was Tina and I’s anniversary, in the little town in Kentucky where we were married. The reading was done on the lawn of my grandparents’ home, which was a particularly touching moment.
Tina: Homebody does good.
Chris: Homebody does good, but also homegirl comes back to the site of her wedding, which was forty-five years ago.
Tina: It was fun, it was absolutely charming.
Chris: It was, it was. The town of Washington, Kentucky has a population of 500, and surprisingly, I think 75 people were there to hear it. So almost one-fifth of the population.
Ewan: I suppose with any biography it does feel a bit like a trip down memory lane. One part of that project that struck a chord with me was your work with Happy Mondays, which is absolutely fascinating. What was it about them that attracted you to working with them?
Tina: Well, we sort of threw ourselves into it. We met with Paul Ryder and their manager in early 1992, not knowing much about them except that they were signed to Factory Records and that we loved Tony Wilson. We heard their music and liked to dance to it. We had just been informed in December 1991, by the Los Angeles Times, that our band, Talking Heads, had broken up. That was news to us. That was a mistake. David just didn’t want to talk about it. He was trying to promote his solo project and so, it got interpreted that way. After a little while, David thought, ‘oh, well then that’s it.’ We were just trying to do something fun and then we felt we would regroup because David was always leaving the band.
Chris: We had no idea what we were getting into. These guys are, you know, crazy irresponsible. We just thought, ‘oh, they’re some fun-loving guys from Manchester who Tony Wilson had the wisdom to sign.’
Tina: We woke up with white hairs. They came with an entourage. They brought every girlfriend, wife, and accompanying dancers like Bez. Bez was a number. I mean, within the first day practically, I was holding his arm so that the bones wouldn’t poke out of his skin. He was asking his girlfriend for a cigarette, and I said ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea’ and before you know it there’s a cigarette in his mouth. Then I was holding an ashtray for him because he was vomiting. I mean, it was pretty nutty.
Shaun was a very, very interesting character. I always thought he was a sort of naughty Catholic schoolboy who’s dyslexia had not been recognized. He was constantly rewarded through silly punishments. If we asked him to leave the room, as punishment, that was exactly the sort of thing he wanted. But he was a very interesting person, as were the other members of the band.
Chris: He still is. It’s incredible what Sean has accomplished considering how he treats himself, but maybe he’s cleaned up.
Tina: Somewhat, maybe. It’s hard to know. But they were very interesting, it was interesting to hear their point of view. They saved football for the UK, for instance, in their view, because they distributed ecstasy. Their band was an excuse to tour the country and sell ecstasy. They also feel that they were instrumental in the divide between the Irish and English also due to ecstasy.
Ewan: I’m glad you brought Tony Wilson up, most notably for his time with The Hacienda. It’s a strange time for venues in the UK, a lot of historic places coming to an end. Brudenell Club, thankfully, hasn’t, but The Leadmill in Sheffield is on its way out. You know better than I do about the legacy of great venues, does that come from the place or the people that play there?
Tina: Money wins. The people, the developers, whoever has the power through money. It’s what happened to the Cotton Club, it’s what happened to CBGB.
Chris: The reason those places are so well loved, I think, is because of the bands that had played there.
Tina: Of course. The audiences too, those that were faithful and loyal. It was so tough because of social distancing. The whole point of getting into those clubs is to be squeezed tight like sardines and, you know, perspiration against perspiration.
Ewan: Absolutely, but onto some brighter collaborations, Tina, you worked with Gorillaz, and you’ve worked with Miss Kitten. What is it about collaboration like that, with artists like those, that attracts you to working with others?
Tina: I think it’s stimulating, it’s taking a walk on the wild side. You’re forced to look in a new direction. I mean, that’s the whole point. As you age, you don’t want your mind to narrow. You don’t want your broad mind and your narrow hips to trade places. I really like challenges. We worked with Frank Darel, he’s a novelist too, but I found it really interesting because we were getting a whole new perspective and it’s not the same now, getting into a room with people is now just sending files to each other.
It isn’t the kind of chemistry that comes from three or four people working off of each other in a room. It’s different, but it’s just getting you to learn new things about what people do. We worked with Viv Albertine, and I did a brief part with her. That was, wow. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never heard anybody play the guitar like that. I love guitar and I found that extremely interesting.
Chris: Have you read her book, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.? I’d recommend both of them. It’s about the early days of punk and The Slits, and it’s really good. Then the other one, that’s good for different reasons.
Tina: Well she had been fighting cancer for a long time, and successfully. She’s just a beautiful woman and brilliant, very forthcoming about her own self and failings and flaws. It’s impossible as the subject to be objective about oneself, but she really works on it. That makes it even more interesting psychologically. It’s much more interesting than, you know, ‘I went into the club and drank a glass of water’. A lot of rock books are like that.
Ewan: You’re right, a lot of them are quite static. It’s quite perplexing though how much goes on and how much is remembered, particularly in Chris’ book.
Tina: That’s right. It’s wonderful, and with our band, it’s completely understandable. I mean, we loved that Talking Heads had a very interesting style. David Byrne had been studying William Burroughs, cut and paste, really pushing himself to do that sort of thing, picking up on snippets of people’s conversations and then noting them down and writing songs like that. Early criticism of our work was not so much about our music but because people were a bit baffled by its point of view. Critics often because they’re writers, don’t really comprehend the music, and they’re often just focusing on that. It’s great when someone can have a more comprehensive idea.
I was thinking of some New York writers, and how once they got into bands, they had a completely different perspective. Lester Bangs, who was so flippant and glib, yeah, talking about Lou Reed’s work and so on, and when it came to be and Bangs actually put a band together, he admitted ‘it’s everything that I didn’t expect’. It’s not all the frontman, that’s the single bullet theory, that only one genius is behind all those inner workings.
Ewan: I agree, it’s why I’ve tried, quite terribly, to learn guitar for as and when I read about or write about music.
Tina: Good for you! Keep at it.
Ewan: And it’s as you said there – the frontman and the single bullet, Chris, your book is very important to showcase that the inner workings are as, if not more, important. One of my favourite bands, Pulp, it’s helmed by Jarvis Cocker who is a big character, but then you look at the likes of Candida Doyle and Mark Webber, their very crucial work goes unsung.
Tina: Yeah, it does go unsung.
Chris: That’s a very good example, Pulp. Although I loved it when Jarvis mooned Michael Jackson. That was a great moment.
Remain In Love – three intimate live on-stage interviews with co-founders and co-writers of the iconic bands Talking Heads & Tom Tom Club, namely Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz.
25 May 2023 – Shelodian Theatre, Oxford
27 May 2023 – Electric Ballroom, London
28 May 2023 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Book tickets for the Remain in Love tour here.
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