“Psycho Killer” is back from the dead. David Byrne performed the Talking Heads hit for the first time since 2006 during opening night on his Who Is the Sky? tour in Pittsburgh. The musician stood beneath a bright spotlight and moved in time with his dancers and band, who wore head-to-toe blue suits that matched his own.
Byrne’s stop at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts is the first in an extensive schedule of shows. The tour kickoff opened with Talking Heads’ “Heaven,” before moving into Byrne’s own “Everybody Laughs,” the Talking Heads song “And She Was,” and “Stranger Overtones,” from his collaborative album with Brian Eno.
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“Psycho Killer” appeared towards the end of the set, sandwiched between Byrne’s cover of Paramore’s After Laughter single “Hard Times” and Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime.” The set also included live debuts of the Who Is the Sky? songs “Don’t Be Like That,” “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party,” and “My Apartment Is My Friend.”
Byrne’s set is full of Talking Heads songs, as expected, but that’s as much time travel as he’s willing to do. “You can’t turn the clock back,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “When you hear music at a certain point in your life, it means a lot. But it doesn’t mean you can go back there and make it happen again.”
Last year, he briefly reunited with bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison to promote the A24 rerelease of their classic 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. “We felt more comfortable with one another, but I’m just going to anticipate your next questions,” he added. “I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s go out on tour again.’ Or, ‘Let’s make another record.’ Musically, I’ve gone to a very different place. And I also felt like there’s been a fair number of reunion records and tours. And some of them were probably pretty good. Not very many. It’s pretty much impossible to recapture where you were at that time in your life.”
Plenty of other artists have been performing “Psycho Killer” for years, including Miley Cyrus and Duran Duran. But given that Talking Heads split up in 1991 and have not performed in public since 2002, during their induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Byrne was the only one able to truly breathe life back into the record.
Earlier this year, Talking Heads celebrated their 50th anniversary with an official video for “Psycho Killer,” the first song they ever wrote as a band. The video from director Mike Mills stars actress Saoirse Ronan. “This video makes the song better,” the band said in a statement. “We LOVE what this video is NOT — it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.”
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