What are Talking Heads saying in French in ‘Psycho Killer’?
Every big band has that one song that defines them. The Rolling Stones have ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, The Who have ‘My Generation’, Blondie have ‘Call Me’, and Talking Heads have ‘Psycho Killer’, a gripping number so representative of their unique greatness that endures to this date as a huge hit. But what do the French lyrics of the song say?
Really, this was the song that made the band. Even though their commercial breakthrough didn’t come until much later with their 1983 album Speaking in Tongues and the hit ‘Burning Down The House’, ‘Psycho Killer’ was the song that started it all, giving the group their shape and focus. They’d been going for a while, though. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz met back in college before all moving to New York City to take their place in the blossoming punk scene.
They’d all been in groups before and were no strangers to songwriting. ‘Psycho Killer’, in fact, had been an early lyrical creation, previously performed by The Artistics, Byrne, Weymouth and Franz’s earlier band. But the shape the song took perfectly represents the shape the bigger-thinking band would take.
Written sometime between 1973 and 1974, Byrne took inspiration from Alice Cooper’s hyper-theatrical shock rock that was all the rage at the time. Interested in Cooper’s use of different voices and characters, he wanted to create his own, more twisted take. Byrne said of the track, “When I started writing this (I got help later), I imagined Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad.” He also took inspiration from the history of cinematic villains, considering our fascination with evil as he added, “Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies.”
Adopting this cold, psychopathic voice, he sets it up immediately with building tension and dangerous paranoia as he sings, “I can’t seem to face up to the facts / I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax / I can’t sleep ’cause my bed’s on fire / Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire.” Originally, the song was going to follow this character through a series of murders, but instead, they decided to stay inside the head of their villain, following his volatile and spiralling psyche.
However, throughout the song, the lyrics are bilingual. The hooking chorus lyric of “Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?” are perhaps some of the most covered and sung-along words of all time, but how many people know what Talking Heads are saying as they dip between French and English?
The chorus line is simple enough as “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Translates to “What is this?” But in the bridge, the language takes over totally for an extended section, written by their bassist Tina Weymouth. Originally, Byrne asked a girl he was dating to write him a murderous monologue in her native French. That apparently scared her off, so the task was passed over to Weymouth to add the finishing touches to their signature song. “I told David that Tina’s mother is French and that they always spoke French in the home,” Franz remembered. “Tina agreed to do it and just sat down and did it in a little over an hour.”
The ‘Psycho Killer’ lyrics go:
Ce que j’ai fait, ce soir-là
Ce qu’elle a dit, ce soir-là
Réalisant mon espoir
Je me lance vers la gloire, okay
In French, this translates to;
What I did, that evening
What she said, that evening
Fulfilling my hope
Headlong I go towards glory, okay
Before snapping back into English to announce, “We are vain and we are blind / I hate people when they’re not polite”, the band use French to deliver the most cryptic part of the song in the most cryptic manner. Sounding somewhat like a confession but leaving a mystery as to what happened “that evening”, the song’s killer seems to believe his evil is some kind of divine plan as he calls his murderous path his “glory”.
Perhaps the switch to a different language is to represent that the killer’s murderous self is seen as a seperate self, such as Norman Bates’ ‘Mother’ person in Psycho. Or perhaps the decision to switch between language was simply a stylistic choice, elevating the track into a simple rock track into something vaster and more interesting, suiting the path the band would always walk down. Either way, it’s become iconic, enduring as perhaps their biggest and most beloved numbers while also being one of their earliest ever written.
