New York United: The day Talking Heads and Lou Reed recorded ‘Femme Fatale’ together
By 1987, the internal chemistry of Talking Heads had gone from peculiar to downright volatile.
The band that started out as art school weirdos cutting their teeth at CBGB had, by then, become an unlikely institution. But behind the scenes, things were tense. There was friction. The kind of friction that eventually leads to breakups, solo projects, and frosty interviews. Still, in the middle of all that, a strange little miracle happened: the entire band managed to get into a studio together. And not just with anyone, but with one of their heroes, Lou Reed.
The occasion? A cover of ‘Femme Fatale’, the Nico-sung Velvet Underground classic. The recording wound up buried on a Tom Tom Club album of all places – Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom – practically ensuring that only the heads (pun intended) would even know it existed. But the credits make it clear: this was Talking Heads, all four of them, plus Lou. Tina Weymouth took the lead vocal, channelling Nico’s detached Euro-vamp cool, while David Byrne, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz backed her up vocally. Byrne added slide and rhythm guitar, Reed brought his own unmistakable guitar touch, and the whole thing came together with the casual brilliance only people of their calibre could pull off.
It’s worth pausing on just how surreal this collaboration was. Lou Reed had long been something of a spiritual godfather for the Talking Heads, a fellow New Yorker who managed to turn intellectual detachment, deadpan delivery and urban decay into rock mythology. Back in the earlier, more innocent days of their career, Lou would dole out advice. According to the band, he once quipped that David Byrne should cover up his arms because they were too hairy. But he also offered darker, more prophetic warnings about the dangers of the music industry and what it does to bands.
The forgotten Talking Heads and Lou Reed collaboration
Chris Frantz once recalled Lou Reed telling them, “A band is like a fist of many fingers. Whereas record companies like to ego-massage one finger and break it off.”
It was a brutal, perfectly Reed-ian metaphor, and, depending on who you believe, not entirely inaccurate when applied to Talking Heads themselves. By the late 1980s, the tensions between Byrne and the rest of the band were practically baked into the public image. Solo records were piling up. Tom Tom Club had become its own strange side universe. But somehow, for this brief recording, they all managed to operate as a unified fist again.
What makes the recording so compelling is how effortlessly it works despite the baggage. There’s no overplaying, no grandstanding. Weymouth’s vocals walk the line between homage and reinterpretation, avoiding Nico karaoke while still capturing that cool detachment. Byrne and Reed’s guitars intertwine without stepping on each other. It’s not some tortured reinvention of the song, but rather a loving séance: Talking Heads conjuring the Velvet Underground with the high priest himself standing right beside them.
The whole thing could’ve easily never happened. Lou didn’t exactly make a habit of popping into side projects for a one-off cover tune. The fact that he showed up at all, while the Talking Heads’ internal fractures were on full display, feels almost like an act of cosmic symmetry. The Velvet Underground had their own share of brutal implosions, after all. Maybe Lou saw a bit of his own old drama reflected in this next generation of art rockers. Maybe he was just amused. Either way, his presence lent the session a kind of twisted benediction.
Today, the track remains a strange footnote in both Talking Heads’ and Lou Reed’s legacies. It’s not widely known, nor is it some lost classic. But for those who know about it, it stands as a quietly powerful artefact—a final, fleeting moment where Talking Heads came together, under the watchful eye of their sardonic New York mentor, and made something simple, beautiful, and oddly tender. It’s the kind of story you could only get out of late-80s downtown weirdness.