The band David Byrne and Brian Eno thought was too commercial
After the acclaimed release of their debut album, Talking Heads began a long-standing collaborative relationship with producer and composer Brian Eno. During their partnership, he helped create the new wave pioneers’ next three albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light.
Despite receiving critical and commercial success for the latter, Talking Heads decided to go on hiatus in 1981. However, singer David Byrne had formed a particularly fond friendship with Eno, and the duo continued to collaborate on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The sample-focused record veered further into experimental territory than any Talking Heads work.
Meanwhile, Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth were looking for a new musical project to occupy their time while on hiatus. The result was the Tom Tom Club. Carving funky new wave soundscapes with hits like ‘Genius of Love’ and ‘Wordy Rappinghood’, the band found commercial success for their more disco-adjacent stylings.
While audiences took to the sounds of Tom Tom Club, Eno and Byrne were reportedly less complimentary. The Talking Heads frontman was unimpressed when the Tom Tom Club’s self-titled debut record went gold. As Frantz recalled in an interview with The Guardian, “He didn’t say a thing.”
“He was very competitive,” the drummer continued, “Later, David did say things about Tom Tom Club like, ‘Well, that’s merely commercial music,’ as if there was nothing else going for it.” This was an opinion that Eno also seemed to share.
Weymouth once explained how the producer was involved during the inception of the Tom Tom Club after they invited him to their jam sessions. On one occasion, the producer brought his engineer Rhett Davies along, however, their collaborative relationship didn’t last long.
“Rhett abandoned ship within three days, leaving us with a huge phone bill,” Weymouth recalled in an interview with the Red Bull Music Academy, “We said, ‘Rhett, what are you doing? Why are you doing this to us?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry, but I just can’t stand what Eno’s doing.’”
When the band members asked what Davies meant, the engineer told them that every time they came up with “a good groove and a good idea,” Eno would say, “Oh I’m sorry, we can’t use that. That’s too commercial. That’s too interesting and pop. We have to make it more complex and different.”
Despite their collaborator’s criticisms surrounding their commerciality, Weymouth intended to retain her pop sensibilities: “You can make really good pop music and make it new. But Brian was just against all that in his mind. But in fact, we were doing what we were going to do anyway.”
Byrne and Eno may have disapproved of Tom Tom Club’s preference for pop because they were more focused on artistic experimentation than popular appeal in their own side project. Nevertheless, Tom Tom Club’s ‘Genius of Love’ featured as part of the iconic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense just a few years later, suggesting the frontman had opened his mind to the world of pop.
