David Byrne reveals outlandish advice from Lou Reed: “Kind of ape-like”
In the early Talking Heads days, David Byrne and co were huge fans of The Velvet Underground; so, in late 1975, when Lou Reed invited the band back to his for an interview, they jumped at the opportunity.
However, as the frontman has now revealed in an interview with The Guardian, the encounter wasn’t quite what the band had expected.
As Byrne explained, “Lou had seen us in CBGB a couple of times and said: ‘Come back to mine afterwards, and we’ll talk about your songs’. We were really excited but nervous and in awe because we were big fans of his solo stuff and the Velvet Underground.”
He added that upon their arrival, Reed proceeded to “eat two quarts of the ice cream he had in his fridge, but was creative as well.”
Proving that he really was a fan of the group, he began playing ‘Tentative Decisions’ on the guitar, while suggesting that “it could be slowed down, and slowed down to the speed of a Velvet Underground song.”
Though Byrne admitted that the moment was “pretty cool,” he added that the band “didn’t slow it down as far as he suggested”.
Moving away from straight music advice, Reed then took a good look at the frontman. Byrne reminisced, “At the time, my arms were covered in dark hair. Kind of ape-like.”
In response to his hairiness, Reed quipped, “You should never wear a short-sleeved shirt on stage”.
Over a decade after the hilarious encounter, Byrne and Reed joined forces for a collaboration on a studio recording for a cover of the Velvet Underground’s track, ‘Femme Fatale’, released on the album Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom by the Tom Tom Club.
Elsewhere in the new interview, Byrne admitted that he is keen to make another feature film, forty years on from his directorial debut, True Stories.
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