THE tale of Tom Tom Club is all about Frantz and Weymouth’s journey from Providence, Rhode Island (where they first met as art students) to New Providence island in The Bahamas, via their Heady days in downtown Manhattan. But the story also takes in a crucial diversion to a suburban garage in San Jose. This was where Dave Smith and John Bowen of Sequential Circuits were working on the Prophet-5, a synthesiser whose portability and programmable memory would revolutionise music. “Jerry [Harrison of Talking Heads] had been in touch with Dave Smith,” explains Chris Frantz. “When we were in California, we drove to his place and he was literally making them in a garage. The great thing about the Prophet-5 was that it was userfriendly. With earlier synthesisers, you had to be kind of like a scientist.”
Weymouth chuckles. “Every day [on tour] we’d lug these things up to Jerry’s room and say ‘Any sounds yet? Can we use it tonight in the show?’ And he’d say, ‘No, but I got the sound of a man pissing.’”