“I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to get it in a nice co-operative way… I know that I was not always the most pleasant person to work with”: David Byrne admits he was a ‘bossy pants’ in Talking Heads

David Byrne has a new-ish album out, Who Is The Sky? and so as part of its promotional campaign, he’s popped up on Louis Theroux’s cunningly-titled The Louis Theroux Podcast.

The interview covers all the ground you’d expect it to. Byrne talks about the early days of Talking Heads: “Our record collections was a mix of things like Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, James Brown and Hamilton Bohannon, O’Jays. If you can imagine conceptually those things being put together. At the same time we had a few rules – we wouldn’t do long indulgent guitar solos, which we associated with the kind of big rock bands.”

This was, he explains, a way of marking out their own musical territory. “I grew up listening to Eric Clapton solos and things like that. But we’re not going to do that – they do that and they do it really well, but no I’m not going to do that.”

He continued: “There was also an idea that every instrumental part that you play has to have an integrity of its own, whatever that means. That it’s not just supporting something else. It exists on its own. For instance, you’d have a bass part that is melodic as the guitar part – each part has its own identity and they all fit together.”

Byrne also talked about how the band put their own spin on funk. “I mean, we like a lot of funk music, but then we’re kind of mixing it in with art rock. We felt that any kind of funky stuff we did, we had to do in our own kind of nerdy white person way. We couldn’t just be like, ‘Okay, here’s some great funky riffs that we’re going to do’. It can have that kind of feel and make you want to dance, but it has to come from our own kind of nerdy white person place.”

“I felt the same way about my movements on stage. At first, I didn’t move at all, and then eventually I thought, ‘Okay, I feel like moving. The music makes me want to dance, but I can’t just adopt the moves that I’ve seen others do - I have to come up with something for my own’, which, little by little, I could do, not all at once, but little by little.”

Theroux also brought up the well-known friction there was between Byrne and the other members of Talking Heads. “I won’t deny that. My social skills were limited,” he says. “If I had an artistic vision like I did with the Stop Making Sense tour… I got to be a little bossy, a little bit of a Bossy Pants. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get it in a nice co-operative way."

"It was more like ‘ok it has to be this’, which is often true of musicians and bands when they’re younger. So I know that I was not always the most pleasant person to work with.”