Memorable basslines don’t get much more memorable than Tina Weymouth’s intro to Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer.

Not bad for a girl whose first role in the band was as their driver. Mainly because she had a car, and was the drummer’s girlfriend.

Weymouth met David Byrne and Chris Frantz when they were all studying at Rhode Island School of Design, and she had a car. She was also the drummer’s girlfriend.

When they moved to New York after graduation, Byrne and Frantz began looking for a bass player who shared their love of the Velvets and Modern Lovers.

When they failed to find a suitable candidate at auditions, Weymouth decided to learn the instrument herself. Byrne cruelly made her audition but she got the job.

The Artistics became Talking Heads and the trio began playing regularly at CBGBs just as punk was being kicked into life there by Television, Blondie, Patti Smith and The Ramones.

Byrne and Frantz had already written and performed a version of Psycho Killer back in Rhode Island, and there are early versions on YouTube, including this one from CBGBs in 1975.

But it came fully to life after Weymouth came up with the French lyrics – she had a French mother and had grown up bilingual during a peripatetic childhood in the USA and Europe. And, crucially, that memorable bassline.

In the Eighties, at the height of the Heads’ success, Frantz and Weymouth – by now a married couple with two small children – took a brief hiatus to form the hip-hop-oriented studio project Tom Tom Club, whose members included two of Weymouth’s sisters, and had hit singles with Genius of Love and Wordy Rappinghood.

After Talking Heads broke up in the early Nineties, Weymouth went on to produce albums by Happy Mondays and Ziggy Marley. She has also guested on recordings by Ian Dury, Gorillaz, Nona Hendryx and the Soup Dragons.

Here are Talking Heads, the trio by now supplemented by Jerry Harrison, making their UK television debut in January 1978 on the Old Grey Whistle Test,

Six months earlier I first saw them making their live debut at The Roundhouse- as a trio – awkwardly sandwiched between The Saints and The Ramones.