They're going to participate in a group interview about Stop Making Sense with Spike Lee at the Toronto International Film Festival

BY ANDY GREENE

AUGUST 16, 2023

AFTER 21 YEARS of bitter estrangement, Talking Heads have agreed to come together for the first time since their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But don’t get overly excited. They aren’t booking a reunion tour or a headlining slot at Coachella next year. Instead, they will appear together at a 40th-anniversary screening of Stop Making Sense at the Toronto International Film Festival. Spike Lee will moderate a post-screening Q&A.


Talking Heads haven’t played a full concert together since the end of the Speaking in Tongues tour in early 1984, but they continued making records throughout the Eighties. Their only live performance took place July 17, 1989, when the Tom Tom Club — which features the Talking Heads rhythm section of drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth — welcomed David Byrne and guitarist Jerry Harrison onto their stage at the Ritz in New York to play “Psycho Killer.”


The band formally broke up in 1991. Five years later, Frantz, Weymouth, and Harrison formed the Heads and cut an album with guest vocalists, including Michael Hutchence, Debbie Harry, Live’s Ed Kowalczyk, and Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. They briefly toured with Napolitano, but Byrne filed a lawsuit to stop it. “Although [the other members of the band] may claim otherwise, it’s a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Talking Heads name, and yet I would define it as something new they’re doing,” Byrne told Rolling Stone in 1997. “I would say it’s not the Talking Heads, they would say it is — just without the singer … It’s different, and it should have a different name.”