Flaming Lips

The Transilvania Live in Milan hosts one of the most fun and bizarre concerts of the year. Flaming Lips fans file in to the sound of "Pet Sounds" playing over the PA, spun three or four times in a row… The lights go down and the show kicks off with the band led by Brendan Benson, one of the finest musical minds to emerge in recent years.

Life is hard for anyone playing "pop songs" these days, but Benson is a rarer case than most: besides being a respected producer, he clearly has genuine songwriting talent, and his band (five consummate professionals: guitar, bass, Farfisa, drums, with Benson on vocals and guitar) boasts a tight, arresting sound (I swear: they didn't botch a single beat!), helped along by the excellent mix in the venue and a metronomic rhythm section pushed right up front. The five guys from Detroit really know how to play, and they win the crowd over from the very first song. After the standard forty-five minutes granted to any self-respecting support act (and, unfortunately, some that aren't), Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd (who replaced Richard English back in '90) take the stage to set up their own gear (!) for what will be a performance packed with madness and pure fun.

After a few minutes the lights go down and the three of them (plus a drummer whose name escapes me) burst into the room dressed, respectively: Coyne in a white jacket like some obscenely rich Oklahoma City impresario, Drozd as an elephant (!!!), and a shaven-headed, sunglasses-wearing Ivins as a leopard (remember the Banana Splits?). They won't take those costumes off until the show is over…

The crowd's warm applause is repaid with dozens of giant balloons launched into the air.

At the sides of the stage, a handful of audience members picked out minutes earlier climb up dressed as chickens, monsters, dwarves and assorted animals.

The show opens with a track from their latest album, while Coyne showers the crowd with confetti and streamers. The mood is that of a birthday party, while the music stays consistent throughout: a kind of pop filtered through psychedelia, shot through with a fierce, caustic, irreverent Zappa-esque nihilism (the spirit of Zappa hangs over the room, I'm sure of it).

Now more than ever I realize the influence these three exerted, and continue to exert, on a number of bands, Mercury Rev chief among them (Jonathan Donahue was in fact sound engineer on several Flaming Lips records).

The music, as I said, is steeped in a feverish, visionary psychedelia, and the songs are constantly punctuated by surreal, occasionally grotesque episodes — like the moment Coyne asks if anyone in the crowd is celebrating a birthday, smears his face with fake blood, and serenades the poor soul with "Happy Birthday" (!). Love them or not, the Flaming Lips are a genuinely original band, innovative in their own way, where the exaggerated, garish vaudeville showmanship acts as a direct tool for shattering the comforting certainties of the pop music they claim to be playing.

Some time ago I spoke out against this fashion for "impressing-the-audience-at-all-costs" through gimmicks that distract a bit too much from the music itself. Well, I can't say the same applies to the Flaming Lips: the deranged antics of these three (four) characters serve as an indispensable counterpart to their schizophrenic "modus vivendi". They could easily pass for giant garden gnomes who've escaped their lawn to happily tear the neighbors' kids to shreds.

The show continues with several tracks from "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robot" (the bulk of the set), but also from the early albums "Oh My Gawd!!!" and "Telepathic Surgery".

In conclusion, I have to admit I was struck less by their music than by their charm and the sense of involvement they managed to create in the room. Still, I'd urge anyone to seize the chance to see them live (I believe they're playing elsewhere in Italy over the following nights, if not tonight itself), because it's rare to get the chance to watch such aberrations "rock out" from this close up.

Oh, I almost forgot! They played for an hour and a half, because at 11:30pm the Transilvania has to make way for the house music…

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