The Talking Heads spawned a number of worthy side projects and spinoffs—David Byrne & Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Jerry Harrison’s The Red and the Black—but none were as funky, danceable, and flat-out fun as Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s Tom Tom Club. Conceived as something of a larkish break from the grandly realised intellectual and artistic pretensions of the Heads’ Remain in Light record, the duo’s self-titled 1981 debut was recorded in Barbados with Weymouth’s sisters and Adrian Belew and Steven Stanley from the Remain in Light band, and not only spawned a couple of hit singles in “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood” but also became, in its own way, enormously influential. This was the sound of downtown New York talking, listening, and rapping to the burgeoning hip hop movement, a hybrid heard in a whole host of acts in the ‘80s and ‘90s, from Madonna to Mariah Carey to the Beastie Boys and beyond. Weymouth and Frantz went on to record several more albums under the Tom Tom Club moniker, but this remains the classic.
For its 45th anniversary, Real Gone Music is proud to offer Tom Tom Club in a clear with green, pink, and white splatter vinyl edition that matches the album’s colourful cover and pays homage to its polyglot sound. Fun, natural fun, limited to 1200 copies!
Tracks:
A1 Wordy Rappinghood [6:27]
A2 Genius Of Love [5:34]
A3 Tom Tom Theme [1:25]
A4 L'Éléphant [4:50]B1 As Above, So Below [5:23]
B2 Lorelei [5:05]
B3 On, On, On, On... [3:33]
B4 Booming And Zooming [4:32]
