Tina Weymouth: 'I thought playing the bass was going to be much easier'

A decade on from her last visit with the Tom Tom Club, Weymouth and her husband Chris Frantz will be back at the Queens Road venue for an ‘in conversation’ event.

“It was fabulous, it was so great, we absolutely loved it,” she enthuses. “The fans there are amazing too. I really have to credit the club owner (Nathan Clark), he’s amazing. He even got the band all wellingtons for going down to Glastonbury – what a sweetheart.

“He told us a great story about the best rider he ever got: Jonathan Richman just wanted a glass, so he could taste the local water.”

The short series of ‘in conversation’ events are a belated tour for Frantz’s book Remain In Love, which came out in the midst of the pandemic. “I’m coming along as the one who says ‘No, it wasn’t like that – but it’s his memoir’,” Weymouth jokes. “But he has a great memory. He did consult me a lot and he used my date books, my agendas to remember where we played and what happened on tour with The Ramones which was fabulous fun in the spring of 1977 in the midst of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, which was really a great time to be there. The Sex Pistols floating down the Thames, The Old Grey Whistle Test with Whispering Bob (Harris), it was so much fun, we had such a good time.”

It’s 50 years this year since drummer Frantz formed a band with fellow Rhode Island School of Design student David Byrne that would eventually become known as Talking Heads, and 49 years ago this month since Byrne turned up at the studio Frantz shared with Weymouth seeking help with a song he had in embryonic form, called Psycho Killer.

She recalls: “Chris had already formed a band (The Artistics) and asked David to be one of the two guitarists but then he had the idea for a song in the vein of Alice Cooper. He already had the title and part of the chorus, so he came looking for lyrics and we gave him some.

“He wanted me to contribute some in French because he wanted to create a split personality type of thing. He was obviously no expert on psychology, nor I, but a lot of my ideas came from thinking about Napoleon and grandiosity, ‘I alone can fix this and I am a very stable genius’ – those would be the lyrics we would be putting in today – but at that time I was thinking a lot about Alfred Hitchcock and the Tony Perkins Psycho character, he hates people when they’re not polite, so I threw that in.

“David was quickly scribbling things down in a notebook and before we knew it we had a song. Then, when it came time to put it to music, again (we referred to) Hitchcock and his great composer (Bernard Hermann), that repetition, those backwards violins.”

From the age of two-and-a-half Weymouth had aspired to be an artist, but she had a longstanding interest in music too.

“Music was another thing that I was interested in at that same age,” she says. “Eventually my mother volunteered me for Mrs Tufts’ English Hand Bell Ringers and I got to go on tour up and down the East Coast of the United States. We wore costumes and we played marvellous old pieces as well as mathematical changes which were liturgical because you couldn't be happy in church. I did that for two years then we moved to Iceland (her father, Ralph, was a Vice Admiral in the US Navy).”

Inspired by The Beatles, Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, she learned to play “a little German nylon-string folk guitar” her father brought back from his travels to a Nato meeting in Austria with a Pete Seeger ‘how to’ guide sent by her brother.

At 17 she also picked up the flute. “I wanted to play the bagpipes before I started English hand bell ringing but my grandmother said ‘No, you’re going to play the flute, it'll expand your lungs’ – I had an innate lung condition – so she got me this flute made in Paris,” she says. “My younger sister taught me embouchure. Everything that she was learning in school she brought home and I would learn it from her and then we would play duets.”

Her musicality would stand in her good stead when Frantz asked her to join the band as a bass player. Fusing the post-punk sensibilities of Pere Ubu and Wire with a heavy dose of funk, her bass lines would become an integral part of Talking Heads’ sound. The line-up was completed with the addition of Jerry Harrison from The Modern Lovers.

At gigs at CBGB’s in New York, Weymouth stood out as one of the few female musicians to play there at the height of punk. “I was aware of Suzi Quatro but she was primarily a British phenomenon even though she’s an LA girl, she loves England and she made her mark there, and I would eventually become aware of Carol Kaye, the session player in Los Angeles, but the only women I was actually aware of who were in rock bands – because rock is really a cocky thing, it's really to do with guys – was a group called Fanny. They were indigenous native American sisters and phenomenally talented and gifted, they were around in the late 60s/early 70s and they were amazing. I didn’t get to see them but I was aware of them.

“Chris asked me for two years to be in the group and I did eventually...I was always going to somehow get my hand in music. Whatever makes you a painter, it's the same drive. Chris kept saying ‘Tina, you could always become a painter at the age of 40, but you can only do this music thing while you’re young’. Of course I adored him, and I wanted to help him and David. I had a car, I could drive them places, so I got a bass guitar and started learning. I thought it was going to be much easier – it’s only four strings, how hard can it be? – but it was an entirely different concept and approach and so much of it was based on what Chris was playing and somewhat what David was singing.

“In the early days David’s guitar was very scratchy, he was using a little Fender student guitar and the tone on his amp was very high and brittle, there was no warmth to it, I couldn't really feel what the chords were, but from his vocal and from Chris' drumming I could come up with something that wove with the two of them. Otherwise it sounded like a little wind-up musical toy with the three of us. Once we got Jerry in the band then we had much more texture and depth. Then the big band changed it even more then we had to be keenly aware that there were so many people playing that it filled up every little bit of air.”

Tom Tom Club came into being when Talking Heads went into hiatus, after four albums, in 1981. Gathering a collective of musicians around them at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, Weymouth and Frantz set about making some of the most joyful music of their career. Weymouth says their eponymous first album was as much fun to make as it sounds on record. “I think that joy brought us good karma, I think the microphones picked it all up, it was just there,” she says, adding that unlike in Talking Heads, those who contributed to the songs were properly credited. “We were just really generous, because of how we’d been treated we bent over the other way, but it was well worth it. We paid for everything but it ended up becoming what it has become, which was kind of a classic.”

Remain in Love: Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in conversation, Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on May 28. www.brudenellsocialclub.co.uk