Synopsis

A man buys a fish head at a market and carries it through a strange, rundown urban landscape. After a homeless man notices his unusual purchase, the video erupts into a surreal parade of fish heads wearing hats, appearing in soup, gathering at parties, and joining absurd musical tableaux. Barnes & Barnes perform amid low-budget sets, crude cutouts, plastic costumes, and deliberately eerie imagery. The deadpan presentation turns the song's nonsensical praise of fish heads into an unforgettable piece of outsider comedy.

Factoids & Trivia

• "Fish Heads" began as a 1978 single and later appeared on Barnes & Barnes' 1980 album *Voobaha*.

• The song was inspired by an unpleasant-looking fish dish Robert Haimer encountered at a Chinese restaurant. The sight of the fish head reportedly became the seed for the song's central joke.

• Bill Mumy and Robert Haimer made the video with a deliberately homemade film aesthetic. Production used a hand-cranked Bolex 16mm camera as well as Super 8 footage.

• Dr. Demento appears as the homeless man who discovers the fish head. The song had first reached a wide audience through his nationally syndicated radio show, where it became one of the program's most requested recordings.

• The video aired on *Saturday Night Live* on December 6, 1980, and was shown again the following week. It subsequently became an early MTV favorite.

• The video's fish-head costumes, cutouts, and improvised-looking props helped give it a cult-film quality that distinguished it from more polished promotional clips of the period.

• In 1985, footage from the video was incorporated into episodes of Nickelodeon's sketch series *Turkey Television*.

• The 1982 *Fish Heads: Barnes & Barnes Greatest Hits* release was issued as a picture disc shaped like a fish head.