Tina Weymouth on the worst gig Talking Heads ever played: “Our supreme Spinal Tap moment”
Touring is often dressed up as life on the road, playing to thousands of people, surrounded by adoring fans, drinking the best alcohol, doing the best drugs, and never wanting for anything. If only. Before bands get to a high level, they have to play some horrid gigs, and even then, at the highest level, there are some horror stories. Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads learnt that the hard way.
Talking Heads were famous for their live show. The recent success of the film Stop Making Sense shows that what they created wasn’t just a stand-out performance for its time but one that still resonates with audiences young and old today.
There needs to be an element of fearlessness installed in musicians when performing so they are happy to take risks and don’t sweat over the repercussions of messing up too much. This fearlessness is instilled through practice. It’s why the small gigs are just as important as the big ones and why bands need to take on board everything that happens during their shows, even the ones they would rather forget. Weymouth remembers two shows in particular that were terrible experiences, one in 2003 with Tom Tom Club and another in 1984 with the Talking Heads.
“Our supreme Spinal Tap moment was with Tom Tom Club,” Weymouth said. “They were celebrating the Howl! Festival in New York. We agreed to do it because we thought it’d be great to do something for the community and the arts. The opening act was a band called Mini Kiss: a group of… little people… dressed in full outfits and makeup, but with no instruments, lip-synching to Kiss songs.”
Despite the surprising support act, Weymouth still wanted to do the gig, so Tom Tom Club went on stage and did what they did best, nearly causing the festival to collapse in the process.
“By the time we went on, most of the 30 people had left,” she added. “The band was almost larger than the audience. And we went out there and played our hearts out. At the end of the gig, our crew backed our rental truck into the marquee, and every penny we made had to go to the replacement of that.”
While that gig can be laughed off, Weymouth’s least favourite Talking Heads show still weighs heavily on her mind, given it was the last one the band ever did, and it ended so abruptly. “It was a phenomenal lineup, and we were the headliners,” she said, “But we couldn’t go on stage because David Byrne, without telling anyone, had let on a couple of crazy girls – who I suppose had their hearts in the right place – they were trying to promote this freedom for Maori people thing, but it was the wrong place and the wrong time. People were booing and throwing things at them, and that was difficult enough.”
The gig was already delayed, and the crowd had been rubbed the wrong way, but things only worsened. “We finally got on stage, and we were five songs into the show when David Byrne ran off and refused to come back on. He said: ‘I’m not going to play for a bunch of people dancing in the mud.’ Go figure. David had a lot of temper tantrums when he got to be a big star. He couldn’t stop it; fame and the whole diva thing was just overwhelming for him.”
Live shows are important for fans and musicians as well, as they help people get more acclimatised to the stage, which eventually goes on to help them in their careers. This means terrible gigs are inevitable, but they all unite and make for a better musician. Ask Tina Weymouth.
