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FURLOUGHED in 1981 while frontman David Byrne made a solo LP, Talking Heads’ husband-and-wife rhythm section, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, soon discovered that their own plans to record an album were not being taken seriously. Their label, Sire, offered them a vaguely insulting $10,000 advance, while their producer of choice, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, decided at the last minute that he would only turn up to work with them if he was “paid a thousand dollars an hour”.

The newly christened Tom Tom Club made their, Frantz quietly gloats that both were bigger successes than anything Talking Heads had produced since Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth first came together at Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-1970s.

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