“I don’t know what he was thinking, but he went into the little kitchen behind the control room and returned with a carving knife”: How David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz created a sinister new wave classic

The three founding members of Talking Heads on a Manhattan rooftop, US, 1976. (Jerry Harrison would join the group at the beginning of 1977.

David Byrne kicked off an extensive world tour in support of his Who Is The Sky? album on Tuesday night in Pittsburgh and amongst a liberal sprinkling of Talking Heads classics in the setlist was one that he hadn’t performed for nearly two decades: Psycho Killer.

The song has a totemic place in the careers of both Byrne and the band. It was the first song the group – then just Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth - wrote when they were still The Artistics.