Talking Heads Scorned $80M Offer to Start Touring Again: Report
They’re some slippery people, those Talking Heads. The legendary rock band recently turned their noses up at an $80 million offer from Live Nation to reunite and embark on a reunion tour, Billboard reported Monday. The company’s executives must have smelled paydirt after David Byrne mended a rift with his former bandmates Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth in time for the 40th anniversary of Stop Making Sense, because Live Nation reportedly approached the group with a fat paycheck to play six to eight festival gigs and headlining slots. The band rejected the offer, according to Billboard. They also appeared uninterested in the prospect of performing at Coachella, whose curator, Paul Tollett, told Billboard that he went to Toronto to vibecheck a potential Talking Heads set last September. Though he met with the band and their team, Tollett “sensed there were no shows happening, so I didn’t make an offer,” he said. He declined to say how much he had been willing to put on the table, but a source close to the matter told Billboard that one Coachella performance could have netted the four musicians as much as $10 million.
