Flaming Lips

Wayne Coyne isn't just the singer, the frontman and the mastermind of the Flaming Lips. He's a genuine master of ceremonies, the celebrant of a playfully secular ritual devoted to unleashing the most positive energies of the human spirit. Just as a Flaming Lips concert is never a mere live set, but a fireworks-lit circus dedicated to conjuring up a world alternative to our own, a technicolor fairy tale from which grey tones and anything falling within the bounds of the ordinary and the everyday are banished. Before the show began, a visibly excited Wayne Coyne kept pacing restlessly backstage, well before Ok Go even took the stage as support act — a band with a vaguely mod look and a brazenly glam sound (somewhere between David Bowie and Franz Ferdinand, to give you an idea). After their set, closed out in style with a hilarious 80s-video-style dance routine, it took over half an hour before the Flaming Lips Circus was finally ready to go. Coyne personally made sure every gadget was in place, that every stage trick worked; all the while wandering restlessly across the stage and behind the scenes, not caring in the least that he's the adored leader of the band, the one who's supposed to appear amid the crowd's roar right as everything is about to start. The group's multimedia happening only began once the singer climbed into a giant plastic bubble, inflated by a burly foam-rubber superman. Accompanied by a swelling wave of keyboards, the air bubble containing the frontman then shot out towards the audience, rolling over several disbelieving heads before making its way back to the stage. Once this opening ritual was over, Coyne finally took his place behind the microphone to open the evening with the epic interplay of choirs and keyboards of “Race For The Prize”, straight off “The Soft Bulletin” (1999). The crowd immediately went wild, spurred on by an explosion of confetti fired from two dedicated cannons. But the surprises didn't end there: during the song, some twenty Santa Clauses and just as many gorgeous purple-dressed alien girls invaded the sides of the stage, dancing non-stop for the whole length of the show.

The second song of the night was the new “Free Radicals”, a psychedelic funk number with a lazy gait. A Prince track played as if the Minneapolis wizard had decided to perform his own song at half speed. It's only the first of several songs in which the band explicitly enlists the audience's help, in this case as guest choir on the “fanatical fuck!” refrain. Coyne is eager to communicate, talking non-stop in the gaps between songs: about how important it is for all of us to be there together, about the symbiotic bond that forms between him and us, about how wonderful it is to live in space, about how beautiful it is to get there through music, and so on. The irony with which he wears the robes of the (post-)hippie guru, and his eagerness to make his audience laugh, keep him from ever being cloying, and make him genuinely entertaining. Between songs he will (not) play various toy guitars, all decked out with blinking lights, colourful stickers and the like. The whole Flaming Lips universe runs on play, on a creative happening free of any formal rulebook, even if Steven Drozd's constantly effects-laden guitar is anything but aimless, always precise in sketching out possible worlds more desirable than our own. “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1” is greeted with a roar and accompanied by images from its own music video; at the end, the chorus is reprised for just piano and voice, with Coyne letting a charming little puppet, worked by his hand as well as his voice, take over the verses. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” also leaves room for improvisation, this time on the intro, played acoustically with the audience once again acting as choir. Meanwhile, images of various kinds scroll across the screen, mostly unreleased and created by Coyne himself: imaginary landscapes halfway between reality and animation, where “manga”-like suggestions often appear, nocturnal, vaguely surreal images of a Japan not unlike the one shown in Sofia Coppola's “Lost In Translation”. “The W.A.N.D.”, with a guitar riff so heavily filtered it sounds like a synth, is performed with blinding lights constantly aimed straight into the audience's eyes.

Shortly after comes the oldest song of the set: “She Don't Use Jelly”, straight off the album “Transmissions From The Satellite Heart” (93). Once again, the talk is of space, of a possible elsewhere: not for nothing is Steven Drozd dressed as an astronaut... The guitar grows heavier, harking back to a past when the band indulged in the kind of distortion beloved of American college rock, as well as that Zappa-esque madness that still runs through their veins.

The first part of the concert closes with a “Do You Realize??” made of almost weightless keyboards and guitars, accompanied by the usual shower of streamers and confetti. Wildly cheered by the crowd (as well as by the “Santa Clauses” and the alien girls), the band picks the show back up with “A Spoonful Weighs A Ton”, yet another get-back straight to the heart of the 60s, to the most crystalline melodies of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The evening closes, surprisingly, with the darkest song of the set, a telling proof that the Flaming Lips haven't entirely (not yet) fled to the moon, but still take an interest in the present and judge it from a different, proudly alternative vantage point. Introduced with a dedication to George W. Bush, with Coyne's sincere hope that the song might shake him up and wipe his brain clean, comes a version of Black Sabbath's “War Pigs” that sounds even angrier than the original. Drozd's guitar smears Tony Iommi's rigid riff, pushing it decisively towards noise. Images of war victims, intercut with the president's TV addresses, help make the song (and its lyrics) feel starkly current.

At the start of the concert, while Coyne rolled happily inside his air bubble (though has he ever really stopped?), the screen displayed the words: “Let yourself have an epic experience”. Having allowed ourselves this “epic experience”, the real challenge is managing to come back down to earth. The Flaming Lips left it behind for good back in 1985, setting off for a planet from which they keep watching it and offering us precious advice on how to transcend a present that is anything but desirable.

Ride the wave of great music

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