Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne recently showed up on ‘Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend’ and talked about the final reunion of the band in the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2002. David described their time onstage as:
“It was fun, but it was tense. I remember there were some musical mistakes that drove me around the band. So I thought ‘Oh Geez, really, now? Here?'”
Byrne also mentioned that the feeling you get out of being a band member gradually evolves:
“I love collaborating with people but being in a band- I have to say it’s really wonderful, you’re like a family, you’re like a little team, a little army, all those kinds of things, but then after a while, it gets all the kind of negative stuff in the family is there, as well as the positive stuff.”
In 1992, the band’s drummer Chris Frantz talked about the band’s disbandment and vocalised his disappointment in David:
“You could say that Tina and I saw the handwriting on the wall a long time ago. That was one reason we were motivated to do the Tom Tom Club. But we were shocked to find out about [Byrne’s departure] via the Los Angeles Times. As far as we’re concerned, the band never really broke up. David just decided to leave.”
In a 2020 interview, David touched on the forceful nature of reunions:
“There’s a period where music really is essential to you kind of defining who you are and what your place is in the world, and you can never let go of that moment. But then again, you could never could never recreate and replace that moment either. There’s plenty of reunion tours and things like that and it’s become an exercise in nostalgia. You can never recreate that moment when people hear things like that for the first time.”
You can watch the excerpt from the episode below.