Tina Weymouth describes Talking Heads frontman David Byrne as “insecure” and “sly”
In a new series of essays, Talking Heads bassist and Tom Tom Club founder Tina Weymouth has described her former bandmate David Byrne as “insecure”.
Opening up about her relationship with the Talking Heads frontman in an essay for The Sunday Times, Weymouth said: “I recently described David Byrne as Trumpian, which didn’t go down well with everybody. What I meant was that, from my experience, everything with David is transactional – he will use you until he has no more use for you.”
She went on to note that Byrne “always seemed very insecure about himself and would often try to blame other people if things went wrong. Chris and I loved him dearly and we did our best to overlook these disastrous character flaws, but it seemed obvious that Talking Heads wasn’t going to last.”
Weymouth goes on to describe Bryne as one of music’s “sly foxes”. The bassist discussed this aspect of Byrne’s character in a recent interview with Far Out’s Jordan Potter. Opening up about Talking Heads’ early days, Weymouth said: “Nobody told us about David Byrne and their personal experiences with David Byrne. So, we didn’t find out for decades about a lot of stuff. Like people now say, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, I used to play poker with him, and I couldn’t understand how he was winning all the time. But then he went home, and I found all these aces hidden in the furniture.’ So, that would have been a clue, but we didn’t know.”
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