Tom Toms After Byrne: ‘Dark Sneak Love Action’ : Pop music: Despite unresolved feelings about Talking Heads’ breakup, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz have a new album and a concert tour.

They say that breaking up is hard to do.

But getting dumped is harder--especially when you get dumped the way Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth say they got dumped by their old comrade, singer-guitar player David Byrne.

After more than three years working apart from the other members of Talking Heads, Byrne announced the breakup last December in The Times’ Pop Eye column.

Frantz and Weymouth say that was news to them. The husband-and-wife team had formed its own band, Tom Tom Club, in 1980 to take up some of the considerable slack time between Heads projects. But Frantz and Weymouth, along with the fourth Head, Jerry Harrison, had no desire to see Talking Heads end.

The couple--Frantz plays drums, Weymouth plays bass and sings--is carrying on with a new Tom Tom Club album, “Dark Sneak Love Action,” and a tour that brings the band to the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight, the Palace on Friday and the Ventura Theatre in Ventura on Sunday. But during a recent phone interview from the Fairfield, Conn., home where they live with their two sons, Robin, 9, and Egan, 6, Frantz and Weymouth were clearly full of unresolved feelings.

“You could say that Tina and I saw the handwriting on the wall a long time ago,” Frantz said. “But we were shocked to find out about (Byrne’s departure) via the Los Angeles Times. We were never too pleased about the way David handled the situation. Communicating with other people has never been David’s forte, at least not on a personal level. We feel like David Byrne’s a very good artist. We’re just sorry that, you know, he didn’t really understand what he had, maybe. But then again, maybe he did, but he didn’t like it anymore. He doesn’t communicate with us, anyhow, so I don’t really know how he feels about it.

“I’m afraid the ball is in his court” as far as renewing relations, musical or otherwise, Frantz added. “I just feel, ‘David doesn’t want to do it; let’s get it on with somebody else.’ We’re really concentrating on the Tom Tom Club right now, trying to have some fun.”

“Dark Sneak Love Action,” Tom Tom Club’s fourth album, serves up the cheerful dance-party funk ‘n’ roll the band has become known for. But there also is a troubled undercurrent to several of the songs, a sense that Tom Tom Club isn’t just dancing for the pure enjoyment of it but to escape or overcome some of life’s darker realities.

“I was trying to get out of darkness,” Weymouth, who writes the band’s lyrics, said in explaining that darker streak in the songwriting. “We’ve been in a real bummed-out way--I think a lot of people have. It’s just the world, and I felt we wouldn’t contribute anything by (being negative). There’s a lot of pain (on the album). It’s about pain overcome.”

Weymouth thinks the pain brought on by the severance of Talking Heads can also be overcome--perhaps by one day reattaching the missing member.

“I feel terrible about any kind of ugliness that has happened,” she said. “I love everybody I’ve been working with, and I love what Talking Heads did and will continue to do.”

Continue? A band whose players and ex-leader apparently haven’t spoken to one another in almost a year?

“Putting it back together in the future (is what) we probably will do,” Weymouth predicted. “It’s a thought, because we’re still the same people we always were, and life is full of very surprising twists and turns.”