(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 25 April 2026 23:00, UK
In 1977, when Talking Heads released ‘Psycho Killer’, things were dark – and they had been for a while.
When we talk about the end of the 1960s, we talk about a cloud rolling in. After the era personified by hippie optimism, there was a sense that what went up had to come down. The down was violent though, brought about by things like the Manson Family murders, the deaths at Altamont festival or the loss of a long list of icons.
At the start of the 1970s, the casualties kept coming. Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix both died, and Andy Warhol’s superstar Edie Sedgwick died, marking the end of that party scene that had started decaying the moment the artist was shot in 1968. In New York, all the hubs were changing. Suddenly, the scene was gathered in grotty little new venues like the CBGB, and even the Chelsea Hotel was descending into chaos beyond its eclecticism. It was becoming too dingy, and people were moving out as the addicts moved in.
It seemed that the crashing end of the ‘60s just kept on getting worse and worse, smashing to the ground and then burrowing underground into hell. That’s around the time Son of Sam appeared.
If things weren’t already harsh enough on the mean streets of New York, in the summer of 1975, they gained an actual, real-life villain – it felt like a horror movie as a string of murders started taking place, leading to the loss of six people, with 11 others wounded, between 1975 and 1977.
New York was used to crime, but this was something else. It wasn’t just violent, it was weird and sinister – targeting young women, he specifically looked for victims in pairs: he’d attack two women together, or sometimes even attack a woman while her boyfriend sat next to her. That’s the detail that freaked people out – everyone was scared, so they wanted to move in packs, but moving in packs was making them a more likely target.
There’s also your classic horror stuff – the killer, who was eventually found out to be David Berkowitz, was sending creepy notes to the police, taunting them for their inability to catch him and signing each off with a weird logo and the name, ‘Son of Sam’. Later on, when he was finally caught, he claimed that all the murders took place while he was possessed by a demon, manifesting in the form of his neighbour’s black dog, Sam.
It’s as if David Byrne sensed all this was coming. A year prior, while the band were still in Rhode Island doing art degrees, Byrne started scribbling down lyrics for a song called ‘Psycho Killer’. At the time, the initial second verse felt even more prophetic, singing, “skirt tight, don’t like that style,” specifying the villain’s targets as women. Even as he sang “listen to me, now I’ve passed the test,” it feels eerily connected to the real-life killer’s claim that all of this death was to appease a devil.
He seemed tuned into the way culture was shifting. “It was inspired by Alice Cooper and Randy Newman, and I thought what if those two got together and wrote a song about her serial killer,” Byrne said of the track, interested in these two polar opposite points of culture. In Alice Cooper, he seemed to see the moment’s obsession with darkness, adding to the broader sense that things were getting creepy.
In the end, ‘Psycho Killer’ would be released only a few months after Son of Sam was arrested. He’s still alive, though, serving life in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, still in New York State. Giving the band their first hit, the neurotic violence of the song landed as an odd theme tune for the city in a state of panic.
