Rhino has collected the whole of Tom Tom Club on vinyl in one box and called it Let There Be Love. There is a problem with that title. "Let There Be Love" is a real Tom Tom Club song, from 2000's The Good, The Bad, and The Funky, and it is not on the record.
That tells you exactly what kind of reissue this is, and it is worth knowing before you spend three figures on it. So here is an honest guide: who Tom Tom Club were, which record to start with, what the box actually contains, and what to buy instead if you are not ready to commit.
Who Tom Tom Club actually were
Chris Frantz played drums in Talking Heads. Tina Weymouth played bass. They were also married, which in a band as famously tense as Talking Heads counted for something. In 1980, on hiatus while David Byrne worked on other things, the pair went to the Bahamas and started rehearsing in a Nassau dancehall. The dancehall was called the Tom Tom Club. They took the name.
What followed was not a solo project so much as a loose collective built around the Compass Point All Stars scene: Weymouth's sisters Lani and Laura on vocals, guitarist Adrian Belew, engineer and co-producer Steven Stanley, percussionist Uziah "Sticky" Thompson, Tyrone Downie on synths. They recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau between November 1980 and April 1981.
The result sounds nothing like Talking Heads. Where the parent band was nervy and cerebral, Tom Tom Club was warm, funny and built for dancing. It is the sound of the rhythm section being let off the lead.
Start with the 1981 debut
If you buy one Tom Tom Club record, buy the self-titled debut. Eight tracks, released October 1981, and it opens with the two songs that made them.
Here is the part most guides written for an American audience get wrong. In Britain, the hit was "Wordy Rappinghood". It reached number 7 in June 1981. "Genius of Love", the song that would go on to be sampled into the ground, limped to number 65 that October. British buyers picked the other one.
Meanwhile the traffic ran the other way across the Atlantic. The album had not been released in North America at all, and over 100,000 copies of the "Genius of Love" single were sold there as imports from Island Records UK before Sire finally did a deal to put out the single and the album properly. For a while, the only way to own this record in America was to buy the British pressing.
The bassline Tina Weymouth did not play
Weymouth is routinely named among the most influential bass players of her generation, and she wrote the "Genius of Love" bassline. She did not play it on the record.
The band had three days of studio time. Working around the clock, her right arm seized up with cramp when it came time to cut the track. She had never played that way before and had no idea it could happen. So she woke the assistant engineer, who was asleep under the mixing console, showed him the part, and had him play it. Nobody is entirely certain which engineer it was.
The beat itself came from Frantz lifting a groove from Zapp's "More Bounce to the Ounce". Belew added the rhythm guitar, Stanley wrote the keyboard melody, and Weymouth wrote the words last, a roll call of the musicians they loved: George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley, Sly and Robbie, Kurtis Blow, Hamilton Bohannon, James Brown.
That accident of a record became one of the most reused pieces of music of the last forty years. Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde got there first with "Genius Rap" in 1981, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five followed with "It's Nasty" in 1982. Then Mariah Carey built "Fantasy" on it in 1995 and sat at number one in America for eight weeks. Latto took it back to the charts with "Big Energy" in 2021, and Carey turned up to perform it alongside her at the BET Awards the following year.
You have almost certainly heard this song. You may never have known whose it was. Rolling Stone put it at number 26 in its 200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time in 2022.
One more thing worth knowing: when Talking Heads made Stop Making Sense in 1984, Frantz and Weymouth performed "Genius of Love" as Tom Tom Club. It is the interlude that gives David Byrne time to get into the big suit.
What is actually in the box
The Let There Be Love box set is seven LPs of splattered vinyl in a spot-varnished slip-case, released by Rhino on 7 August 2026. It gathers all six studio albums:
- Tom Tom Club (1981), the debut, in its original eight-song vinyl sequence
- Close to the Bone (1983), home to "The Man with the 4-Way Hips"
- Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom (1988), in the revised US configuration
- Dark Sneak Love Action (1992), the techno-facing one, spread across two LPs, with a cover of Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing"
- The Good, The Bad, and The Funky (2000), featuring Toots Hibbert and Bernie Worrell, plus a run at Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby"
- Downtown Rockers (2012), the five-track EP
Now the honest part. Rhino has configured every album to fit standard vinyl running times, which means anything that only ever existed on CD has been dropped. There are no non-album singles and no 12-inch mixes. The expanded editions of the first two albums have not been carried over. The Bob Dylan cover "She Belongs to Me" is gone from Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom. Downtown Rockers appears as the five-track vinyl EP rather than the longer CD or digital versions.
And The Good, The Bad, and The Funky arrives three tracks lighter than the original Rykodisc CD, missing "Time to Bounce (Dubbed Version)", "Dangerous Dub", and the title track of the box you just bought.
None of that makes it a bad set. Six albums, properly pressed, in one place, is a genuinely good way to own this band. It just is not the complete Tom Tom Club, and if you already have the CDs, do not throw them out.
If the box is too much, start on the Talking Heads shelf
A three-figure box set is a serious commitment to a side project. If you like the sound of all this but want to work up to it, the Talking Heads catalogue is the obvious way in, and it is where most people find Tom Tom Club anyway.
Remain In Light is the one to own if you own nothing else. Recorded at Compass Point with much of the same extended cast, it is the record where the rhythm section takes over, and it makes the Tom Tom Club debut sound less like a detour and more like an inevitability. Fear Of Music is its darker, tighter predecessor, and Speaking In Tongues is the pop record they made once they had absorbed all of it.
For the deeper end there is the Talking Heads: 77 Super Deluxe Edition, four LPs plus four seven-inch singles and a hardback book, and the More Songs About Buildings & Food Super Deluxe Edition. Both are box sets in the same spirit as Let There Be Love, and both are better documented.
If live recordings are more your thing, we hold Live At The Agora, Cleveland, 1978 and the RSD 2025 double Live On Tour '78, both from the tour behind their second album.
So who is the box for?
Buy it if you already know you love this band, want all six albums pressed consistently, and value having them in one object. The splatter pressings and the slip-case are properly done, and nothing else collects this catalogue on vinyl.
Do not buy it as an introduction. Start with the 1981 debut or with Remain In Light, spend a month with either, and see whether you want the other five albums. Tom Tom Club is a band people fall for slowly, usually after realising they have been humming "Genius of Love" since before they knew its name.
