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Fact #116239

When:

Short story:

New York’s Talking Heads release their classic single, Psycho Killer, which had been written by frontman David Byrne while at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

Full article:

David Byrne (Talking Heads) : I attempted, when I was much younger, to write some songs. Gosh, they were really terrible! They were like fake Bob Dylan songs. And I never finished them. That one was the first one that got finished.

Rudy Cheeks (musician, friend of David Byrne) : Barbara Conway,one of the Tampoons, used to use that phrase all the time. She used to call people psycho killers. ‘That guy’s just a psycho killer!’ We shortened it to PK after a while. We called people PKs.

David 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 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 really doesn’t involve you emotionally. The other extreme is to describe everything as a series of sensations. I think that sometimes has more power, and affects people a little stronger.

Chris Frantz (Talking Heads) : David and I had a band together, and David came in and said, "I've got this song, it's like an Alice Cooper song - sort of." He started to play it, saying, "This is as much as I've got." Between the three of us, we managed to make it complete.

Tina Weymouth (Talking Heads) : It was going to be a pop song that everybody could relate to. It was going to have a conventional rock structure.

Tina Weymouth : David had asked somebody else to do it in another language because he wanted to create a split personality. He was trying to recreate a person who has a criminal mind. The people who he originally approached to do it said, "It's about a psycho killer? No, we won't contribute to that song." They were socially-minded … And I knew French. So I put in the stuff that sounds like a Napoleonic complex.

David Byrne : It seemed a natural delusion that a psychotic killer would imagine himself as very refined and use a foreign language to talk to himself.

Tina Weymouth : Then David said, "Okay, we've got this French. So what would a French band do with this rock 'n' roll song?" I said, "Well, the French right now are really into what they call Yeah Yeah music, because of the Beatles." So he put in all those Fa Fa Fas instead of Yeah yeah.

Chris Frantz : ‘Fa fa fa fa fa’ came from Otis Redding. We sort of incorporated it.

Naomi Reichbart (school/college friend of Byrne) : I remember when David was writing the song. We were sitting in his room on Brown Street. He had this notebook on his bed and he was reading us the words. We were all laughing, because of the French stuff.

Tina Weymouth : The part about ‘I hate people when they aren’t polite,’ the vainness, was because we didn’t want to talk about the obvious things dwelt on with psycho killers.