TALKING HEADS - (NOTHING BUT) FLOWERS

Released: October 3, 1988

Charts:  UK: #79 

Released in 1988 as a single from “Naked”, the final studio album by Talking Heads, “(Nothing But) Flowers” stands as one of the band’s last great statements—ironic, restless, and musically borderless. It’s a song that captures everything the group did best: wry social observation, global influences, and the uneasy humor of David Byrne’s worldview.

At the time of “Naked”, Talking Heads were already drifting apart. Byrne’s growing slate of solo and collaborative projects had long strained the band’s internal dynamics, leaving his bandmates unsure if Talking Heads still existed except in name. That tension makes the song even more striking: it’s a vibrant, almost jubilant piece created at a moment of deep uncertainty.

Produced with Steve Lillywhite, the song features an expanded cast of musicians, including percussionists from West Africa, singer Kirsty MacColl, and—on lead guitar—Johnny Marr, fresh off his departure from The Smiths. Marr’s shimmering 12-string lines give the track its nervous sparkle; he has recalled that what became the song’s iconic introduction was recorded accidentally while he was warming up, unaware the tape was rolling. 

In a reversal of the “pave paradise” lament popularized by Joni Mitchell, Byrne imagines a post-apocalyptic Eden where nature has reclaimed everything. Parking lots are now meadows, shopping malls have become forests, and the conveniences of late-20th-century consumer life—fast food, lawnmowers, highways—are extinct. The narrator is divided: he marvels at the beauty of the natural world while complaining that he misses the comforts of civilization. It’s funny, but also uncomfortably familiar. Byrne skewers our environmental hypocrisy decades before it became mainstream conversation.

The song’s music video, directed by Byrne and Sandy McLeod, was ahead of its time. Featuring bold, experimental typography by Tibor Kalman and Emily Oberman, the visuals overlay declarative text and fragments of lyrics as the band performs with its full expanded lineup. It is both playful and cerebral, a design piece as much as a music video.