Qu'est-ce que c'est? Part Deux

Last Friday I posted a dynamite clip of the young Talking Heads doing "Psycho Killer" on The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show. At the time, the clip seemed more than compelling enough to succeed without any pithy Rock Turtleneck commentary, until I read the song was influenced by equal parts Alice Cooper and Randy Newman.

According to Mix magazine, "Psycho Killer" was the first song Byrne ever wrote (he co-wrote it with bassist Tina Weymouth). Said Byrne:

“‘Psycho Killer’ was written as an exercise with someone else's approach in mind. I had been listening to Alice Cooper — Billion Dollar Babies, I think — and I thought it was really funny stuff. I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this!’ It was sort of an experiment to see if I could write something.

“I thought I would write a song about a very dramatic subject the way Alice Cooper does, but from inside the person, playing down the drama. Rather than making it theatrical the way Alice Cooper would, I'd go for what's going on inside the killer's mind, what I imagined he might be thinking.

“I wanted it to be like Randy Newman doing Alice Cooper. One way of telling the story would be to describe everything that happens — ‘he walks across the room, he takes so many steps, he's wearing such-and-such.’ That tells you everything that's going on, on one level, but it doesn't involve you emotionally. The other extreme is to describe it all as a series of sensations. I think that sometimes has more power and affects people a little stronger. It seemed a natural delusion that a psychotic killer would imagine himself as very refined and use a foreign language to talk to himself.”

Years ago, I read somewhere years that "Psycho Killer" was a nickname given to Byrne in high school, no doubt due to his uneasy stare. But rather than pull a Columbine, Byrne constructively sublimated his hurt feelings into a brilliant song. This story would make sense, as some of the lyrics seem directed at the "popular" table in the high school cafeteria:

You start a conversation you can't even finish it.
You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed.
Say something once, why say it again?

Appearing on their incredible debut Talking Heads '77, "Psycho Killer" has been performed in many arrangements over the years. Perhaps the most famous is Byrne's duet with a beatbox in the opening sequence of Jonathan Demme's landmark 1983 concert film Stop Making Sense:


And here is another amazing version, from a 1980 Rome show, featuring Twang-Bar King Adrian Belew.