INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Electronic Sound OCTOBER 2021 - by Stephen Dalton

DEVOTED TO THE ART OF MOVING BUTTS

First there was the inventive Wordy Rappinghood. Then there was Genius Of Love, one of the most sampled tracks ever. By the time they released their debut album in October 1981, Tom Tom Club were already transatlantic pop megastars. Not bad for a band that Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz - still one of the freshest and funkiest rhythm sections in the world - started as a side project.

The sun sinks on a blustery September afternoon. It is forty years, pretty much to the day, since Tom Tom Club unleashed Genius Of Love, transforming Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz from a cult avant-rock rhythm section to international sunshine pop superstars. Together with Wordy Rappinghood and other dancefloor-friendly cuts, Genius Of Love was a groundbreaking fusion of funk, reggae, post-punk, mutant disco and an emergent New York street style that would soon become known as hip hop.

This music was a pure sensual liberation, a euphoric antidote to the pair's work with David Byrne and Jerry Harrison in the cerebral, angsty, new wave art rockers Talking Heads. Who needs to think when your feet just go?

Speaking from their home in Connecticut, Weymouth and Frantz recall flying from wintry New York City in March 1981 down to the sunny Compass Point Studios in The Bahamas. Here, at the legendary music factory nestled in a sleepy beachside resort ten miles west of Nassau, their new Tom Tom Club alias was born.

"We were coming off Remain In Light - this great, wonderful, amazing Talking Heads album," Chris Frantz recounts. "But we wanted to do something that was a bit more festive, something that would work easily on a dancefloor. We were thinking of our friends who hung out at the Mudd Club or Danceteria or The Ritz. We wanted a record that could be played at those places and for people to really enjoy it."

Tom Tom Club was a loose concept at first. The only firm plan, Tina Weymouth says, was to sound nothing like Talking Heads.

"We were trying to avoid competing with our own band," she notes. "So we thought the right thing to do was to become a dance act, because we both loved to dance. In the early days, before Paradise Garage and so on, we used to go to private loft parties. The gay community of New York was so much fun. So we were very much inspired to go in that direction and to not compete with Talking Heads. In fact, we didn't even want to have our faces on the records. We had cartoon renditions of ourselves in our videos long before Gorillaz."

Tom Tom Club was also a breezy holiday away from the stormy internal politics of Talking Heads, which had taken a few fraught turns during the recording of Remain In Light. Even at their electrifying creative peak, David Byrne was already dropping hints about disbanding the group. According to Weymouth and Frantz, the album sessions ended with disagreements over shared songwriting credits and a prickly showdown with producer Brian Eno.

"Eno stomped off," Weymouth remembers. "The last time we saw Eno in that period, he left saying, 'I have never been treated so dishonourably in my life'. We weren't in the room with him and David, so we'll never know what transpired between them. And it's not like David will ever tell you. But, yes, Tom Tom Club was a breath of fresh air. From the start, it was a very happy experience. We didn't feel that Talking Heads was an unhappy experience at all, but we did think, 'Oh my god, those people are so dark, so let's do something light and uplifting!'."

There was also a commercial imperative behind Tom Tom Club. In 1980, Talking Heads had toured Remain In Light with an expanded nine-piece band - a costly exercise that was partly bankrolled by the four members themselves. After the tour, when David Byrne and Jerry Harrison went on a Heads hiatus to work on solo projects, Weymouth and Frantz were forced to consider their own uncertain financial future.

"We had no idea how long David was going to take to do his solo thing," says Frantz. "Tina and I were always very content with our roles in Talking Heads, we were never looking for anything outside. But when the other two members started making solo records, we weren't in a position to sit around and relax and wait for them to return to the fold."

After rejecting a "paltry" offer from Seymour Stein at Sire, the label that Talking Heads were signed to, Weymouth and Frantz struck a gentleman's agreement with Island Records founder and Compass Point Studios owner Chris Blackwell. He gave them three days of studio time to cut some trial tracks, telling them an album deal would follow if he liked the results.

"So we worked on three tracks - Wordy Rappinghood, Genius Of Love and Lorelei," Weymouth explains. "Even just with the rhythm beds that we'd laid out, we already had the beginnings of something good and fruitful - and Chris Blackwell knew it. He understood that bass and drums can be very powerful."

To co-produce the recordings, Tom Tom Club opted for Compass Point's twenty-three-year-old audio engineer Steven Stanley. They had initially secured the services of the late, great dub alchemist Lee 'Scratch' Perry, but he failed to show up. After three weeks, they tracked him down on the phone. He assured them he was still keen on the project, but he wanted a payment of $1,000 per hour. When Weymouth and Frantz balked at this price, Perry claimed he could finish the whole album in eight hours. Tom Tom Club later become friends with the Jamaican studio wizard and recorded a cover of his awesome solo track Soul Fire, but Frantz believes they "dodged a bullet" when he dropped out of the picture.

"Lee Perry was a phenomenon," Weymouth laughs. "He was extraordinary, but I think he really was too mad for us."

Around the core duo of Weymouth on bass and vocals and Frantz on drums, Tom Tom Club was always a fluid collective. Their first incarnation featured numerous guest musicians, including avant-rock guitarist Adrian Belew, famed for his work with David Bowie, King Crimson and Frank Zappa, as well as Talking Heads. In an inspired move, Weymouth invited her siblings Lani, Laura and Loric to share vocal duties, while the other contributors included various members of the studio's in-house band, the Compass Point All Stars, most notably keyboard player Tyrone Downie and percussionist Uziah 'Sticky' Thompson. Downie had previously been a long-time member of Bob Marley & The Wailers. Fellow reggae titans Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who were recording with Grace Jones in Studio A while Tom Tom Club worked in Studio B, also offered a helping hand.

"Sly and Robbie came and did handclaps on Genius Of Love," Frantz clarifies. "They didn't actually play on the record, although the work they were doing next door was definitely very inspiring to us - and vice versa I think. They came in and heard Genius Of Love and Robbie said something like, 'Bus it straight to Paris, it's a hit!'. So that's sort of what we did."

Simply titled Tom Tom Club, the album that emerged from Compass Point was a fizzing multicultural cocktail of analogue synthpop, wonky rock primitivism and tropical rhythms, topped off with a post-punk DIY attitude. Some tracks have the knotty twang of The Slits, others the naive charm of early Bananarama. But for better or for worse, the album is mostly known for its two big breakthrough singles.

The first of these, the witty Wordy Rappinghood, was one of the earliest hip hop-influenced tracks to crack the pop mainstream. With its stream-of-consciousness rhymes, nimble skipping-rope beat, energetic Afro-Latin percussion and sampled typewriter chatter, the record wears its historical significance lightly. The lyrics feature the lines, "Words are like a certain person / Who can't say what they mean / Don't mean what they say". A cynic might interpret that as a sly dig at a certain Mr Byrne?

"It's not sly, it's overt!" Weymouth laughs. "It's for anybody who isn't capable of expressing themselves directly. But not only David Byrne, it's all people who are attempting to obfuscate. I don't think David does it on purpose, that's just who he is."

For many, Tom Tom Club's signature anthem will always be Genius Of Love, an infectious mixture of swoony teenage-crush lyrics, hiccupping guitar licks and squelchy synthesiser chirps, all set to a slinky liquid groove, the rolling mid-tempo rhythm partly inspired by Zapp's 1980 electro-funk single More Bounce To The Ounce. The song is largely Weymouth recalling the giddy first flush of her long romance with Frantz, which began in 1972. But it also pays tribute to some of the greatest artists in African-American and Jamaican music - from James Brown, Smokey Robinson and Bob Marley to George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Hamilton Bohannon, Kurtis Blow and, in a neat meta-touch, the track's handclapping guests Sly & Robbie.

On a more political level, Genius Of Love was Weymouth's response to accusations of cultural appropriation levelled at Talking Heads for flirting with funk and disco, countering that criticism by celebrating the universal feel-good appeal of soul music.

"It's really an autobiographical story of the early days of my relationship with Chris, listening to these marvellous people and going out to clubs and dancing," she expounds. "Chris had reminded me that there was already a wonderful song called 'Sweet Soul Music that paid homage to classic African-American singers and musicians, but this was a new take on it. We thought it had been at least twenty years since we'd had something like that, so we wanted to pay respect where respect was due. So Genius Of Love is about the two of us falling in love and our courtship to this great music."

Tucked away in its deceptively dreamy narrative, the track contains a verse about the singer and her boyfriend going "insane when we took cocaine" and the boyfriend then disappearing for a whole weekend. This, it transpires, was Frantz's regular party trick in the early 1980s.

"Yes, somebody did go insane on cocaine," Weymouth says.

"Phooweee... those were the days!" Frantz laughs.

"Chris would disappear for days at a time," Weymouth discloses. "Even Timothy Leary said to me, 'You have a problem, Tina!'."

Frantz was finally persuaded to curb his drug use, but he had a serious habit for quite some time.

"We weren't always doing cocaine," he shrugs. "It became more of a problem when we had too much time off. If you didn't have to be responsible for too much the next day, you could just... party on"

The super-catchy Wordy Rappinghood became a Top 10 smash in the UK, while Genius Of Love turned Tom Tom Club into transatlantic stars, landing at Number 31 in the US Billboard charts. Both songs also topped the American dance charts. Genius Of Love has since become an enduring anthem, sampled, covered or re-interpreted by a huge array of artists, including Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, Mariah Carey, Public Enemy, Mark Morrison, Ice Cube, Dream Warriors, Busta Rhymes, Little Boots and more. Along with Blondie, Tom Tom Club were one of the first white pop bands to pick up on New York's emerging hip hop scene, so it seems fitting that a host of rappers would later return the favour.

"The tempo of it is very good for rapping, among other things," Frantz says, pondering why this one immortal track struck such a deep chord. "But if I may say so, it also has a sexy feel to it that a lot of other songs don't have."

With sales in excess of half a million copies, Tom Tom Club's self-titled debut album went gold in the US. But the group essentially remained a Talking Heads side project for the first decade or so, with Weymouth and Frantz recording and performing live sporadically between their day-job commitments. According to Frantz, David Byrne was dismissive of the duo's "merely commercial" success, which initially eclipsed that of Talking Heads, but he also saw that could be useful to his own career.

"David would have gone solo much sooner than he actually did had it not been for Tom Tom Club," Frantz asserts. "Because Tom Tom Club showed everybody in the music business that Talking Heads wasn't just a one man show, the way David had always pretended it was. It's no secret that David felt Talking Heads was only one phase of his development. But I think the fact that Tina and I were selling tons of records with our first album, getting lots of airplay, getting our songs sampled by lots of artists, made him realise, 'Oh, maybe these people are still of value to me'."

With Tom Tom Club scoring hits around the globe, it wasn't long before gig promoters began asking them to play shows, so Weymouth and Frantz put together a live band to open for Talking Heads on their 1982 world tour. Ahead of their joint appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in early July, a local superstar resident knocked on the dressing room door to wish both groups well.

"I opened up the door and it was David Bowie standing there!" Frantz recollects. "He looked very nondescript. He was wearing an army fatigue anorak and glasses. He was very cordial, he said hello to everybody, and then he said, 'Are you going to be eating this cheese?'. We said, 'No, go ahead'. So he put the cheese into a napkin, folded it up, and put it in his pocket. Then he said, 'How about these nuts...?'."

A couple of weeks after the Montreux show, keyboard player Tyrone Downie suffered a mini-breakdown at the airport in Belgrade, the capital of what was then the communist state of Yugoslavia.

"So we were behind the Iron Curtain at the time," Frantz explains. "Tyrone unzipped his fly, whipped it out, and began to pee... or he threatened to. He started being hostile towards some guards who were carrying submachine guns. Fortunately our manager kept his cool and very quickly bought him a ticket to Munich."

Downie's fragile condition was in part because he was mourning the recent death of his close friend and former bandmate Bob Marley. Although the keyboardist later made a full recovery, the tour was tough for him.

"We didn't know it, but he was addicted to coke and speed at that point," Weymouth adds. "He was drinking his whole mini-bar every night and we were picking up the tab, not knowing how to handle the situation."

Weymouth and Frantz welcomed their first child into the world soon after returning home from the tour. With Talking Heads on hold, the couple spent much of this period living in The Bahamas, working on Tom Tom Club material and partying with famous neighbours and visitors such as James Brown, Grace Jones, George Clinton, Joe Strummer, Robert Palmer and Ian Dury. One of their more unlikely Nassau neighbours was Emil Schult, lyricist and sleeve designer for several Kraftwerk records, including Autobahn and Radio-Activity. The pair are still firm friends with Schult to this day.

"Emil is one of the most generous artists you will ever meet in your life," Weymouth grins. "He will just give you art!"

Between Talking Heads duties. Tom Tom Club released three more albums over the next decade - Close To The Bone (1983). Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom (1988) and Dark Sneak Love Action (1992). Although none of them enjoyed the same critical or popular acclaim as their beloved debut, there wore many unsung nuggets in the mix. like the alt-funk archness of The Man With The 4-Way Hips. A belated fifth album. The Good, The Bad And The Funky (2000), also contains some underrated gems, particularly the gorgeous candy-floss trip hop reverie Superdreaming and the luscious lovers rock lullaby Let There Be Love.

Weymouth believes the later decline in the band's record sales was partly down to changing fashions, but also because Tom Tom Club were a part-time outfit who only played live intermittently.

"We didn't have a good band together to tour behind those records back then." she says. "We do now. but it took a long time."

Talking Heads retired from touring in January 1984. shortly after filming their brilliant concert movie Stop Making Sense with director Jonathan Demme, which rather smartly also features Tom Tom Club's Genius Of Love. According to Weymouth, David Byrne thought the band no longer needed to play live because Stop Making Sense "will tour for us for the rest of our lives".

Although Talking Heads continued to make studio albums, their internal relations became increasingly frosty, finally reaching a breaking point in 1991, when Byrne casually informed a Los Angeles Times reporter that the group had split up. This was news to Weymouth and Frantz. Ironically, the last time the four original members had played together was actually as Tom Tom Club. Weymouth and Frantz had invited Byrne and Jerry Harrison to join Lou Reed and Debbie Harry as guests on a cover of The Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale, which appeared on Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom.

"That was another way that we were trying to keep everything together," Weymouth says. "We really didn't want the band to split. If David wanted some separation and some space, that was always do-able. I mean, he was offered a solo deal where every year or two years he could spend a few months with Talking Heads and the rest of the time was his... but he didn't take that deal."

As Talking Heads dissolved into acrimony, Weymouth and Frantz took on more studio production work, recording platinum albums with Ziggy Marley and, less happily, overseeing Happy Mondays on the notoriously drug-addled sessions for Yes Please!, the Mondays' 1992 follow-up to Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches. With frontman Shaun Ryder in the grip of heroin and crack cocaine, the album proved a costly disaster, pushing Factory Records to the brink of bankruptcy.

"Tina and I went into that project completely unprepared for what Happy Mondays were like," Frantz admits. "All that we knew was they were this happening band from England and they were recording in Barbados... so why not? We realy should have quit after the second or third day, but we hung in there because we'd always loved Tony Wilson, the Factory boss. He was a big champion of Talking Heads from the first time we ever went to Manchester, so we were happy to be involved in something to do with him. In retrospect, it's kind of a miracle anything got made at all."

The pair worked with Shaun Ryder again in 1996, by which point he had cleaned himself up. Ryder was one of the vocalists on No Talking, Just Head, the cheekily titled album by The Heads, a project Weymouth and Frantz put together with Jerry Harrison. Debbie Harry, Richard Hell and Gavin Friday were among the other contributors. The Heads proved to be a short-lived venture, however, and Weymouth and Frantz turned their attention back to Tom Tom Club, which they now viewed as their musical mothership.

In 2002, the estranged members of Talking Heads called a truce for just long enough to play a three-song set for their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, where Frantz offered thanks for "giving this band a happy ending". But afterwards, when he proposed a full reunion to Byrne, he was hastily rebuffed.

"We had hoped that David would wake up and go. 'What was I thinking?'," Frantz says. "Talking Heads were a great band and we had this incredible musical chemistry, so I thought, 'Why don't we take one more lap around the track just for the hell of it?'. We were all hoping maybe that would happen, but I guess in the back of our minds we knew that was not on David's agenda."

Over the last two decades. Byrne has reportedly turned down some jaw- dropping payday offers from big promoters - Frantz estimates north of thirty million dollars - to reform Talking Heads for a comeback tour.

"It's crazy, but David's simply not into it," he shrugs.

"There's not enough money in the world," Weymouth agrees. "He doesn't know who we are or what we look like now. He refers to us as 'some people I used to play with...'."

In the decades since Talking Heads split the perennially genial Frantz has mostly spoken of David Byrne in diplomatic terms, perhaps with one eye on a possible future reunion. But last year, he published the superbly titled Remain In Love, an unsparing memoir in which he accuses the former Talking Heads frontman of some pretty ugly behaviour, from cutting his bandmates out of shared songwriting credits to leaving turds in hotel bedrooms. Frantz is currently talking to what he calls "powers that be" about turning the book into a film.

Byrne recently told Rolling Stone that he has purposely not read Remain In Love to avoid having to give any response. In turn, Weymouth and Frantz have side-stepped seeing Byrne's universally praised live show and concert film American Utopia, writing it off as a "Broadway show tunes" project.

"It's tragic that he goes and does these American Utopia things and so much of it is based on Talking Heads," Weymouth says. "I think he's basically trying to rewrite the history of the band.'

Weymouth admits she spent years feeling depressed and angry over Byrne's repeated rejections. Now she insists she and Frantz have accepted there will never be a reconciliation.

"Like our former president Donald Trump, David's relationships tend to be transactional," Frantz sighs. "I wish him well. I loved working with David and I think it's safe to say that Tina and I loved him as a person. But it was not reciprocal. The relationship with him was merely business."

"Totally true," Weymouth nods. "Squeeze the orange, toss the rind."

Frantz claims the psychodrama of Talking Heads is "all Courvoisier under the bridge" these days. But for longtime fans who enjoy the music of both Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, as well as Byrne's solo work, this unresolved trauma feels pretty sad. Like being a child who has to choose between parents after a bitter divorce.

"I agree with you about the divorce thing," Weymouth says. "As kids, we felt the same way about The Beatles splitting up. It still breaks my heart.'

What if one day there was to be a friendly phone call, a peace offering, an apology...?

"No chance," Weymouth insists. "David's never going to apologise."

"But if he did - by some miracle - I'd say, 'David! What took you so long? Let's get this together while we're still alive!'," Frantz beams.

Tina Weymouth and Chris Front: have now been in Tom Tom Club for four decades. That's more than double the time they spent in Talking Heads.

Despite some long sabbaticals. Tom Tom Club remain a touring unit and were still performing regular shows until the pandemic shut everyone down. Frantz reveals that they played a low-key surprise gig just a few weeks ago, which he says was "a lot of fun".

Always a family affair, the band's current line-up includes the pair's eldest son Robin, aka Kid Ginseng, who releases electro and breakbeat records on his own Kraftjerkz label. Their younger son Egan is a visual artist and video maker who has exhibited throughout North America and Europe. He's married to Liz Wendelbo from Xeno & Oaklander.

Outside of their own mini musical dynasty, Weymouth and Frantz are still clearly enthused by contemporary bands. They mention Texan psych outfit Khruangbin, Australian trash rockers Amyl And The Sniffers, and hotly tipped Isle of Wight post-punk duo Wet Leg as current favourites. It's a pretty hip playlist for a couple of semi-retired seventy-year-olds. Even today, it seems these art school veterans are drawn to the skewed fringes of music rather than to the mainstream.

"If you watch something like the Grammys, you are going to be totally disappointed," Weymouth states. "There'll be two or three people who are about music, but the rest are about butt implants. These are the type of people who will put silicone into their bodies but won't take a vaccine!"

Earlier this year, Tom Tom Club released an edited version of The Good, The Bad And The Funky on blue marble vinyl - 'I think it was even bettor with shorter songs," Weymouth soys. "I'm into shorter songs these days' - and they're not ruling out a new elbum at some stage in the future. Although we haven't heard any fresh Tom Tom Club material since the 'Downtown Rockers' EP in 2012. the duo have not retired from recording. They recently overhauled their studio in the barn at their Connecticut home, buying a second-hand mixing desk on eBay from Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon. Interestingly, they namechecked Wu-Tang 20 years ago on the track *Who Feelin' It?*. There is a poetic symmetry at work here.

"It has been a long time since we released anything new," Frantz admits. "I feel we're ready to start writing and to make another record now, but the truth is that what everybody really wants to hear is our old material. So making another record is effectively an excuse to go out and play our old stuff. I think people like Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones have the same problem. It's not a criticism of the new stuff, it's just that the old stuff is so embedded in people's hearts and minds."

The blue vinyl edition of The Good, The Bad And The Funky is out now on Nacional. A pink vinyl version of the Downtown Rockers EP is also available on Nacional, while Chris Frantz's Remain In Love book is published by White Rabbit

ALBUMS | BIOGRAPHY | BOOKS | INSTALLATIONS | INTERVIEWS | LYRICS | MULTIMEDIA