But it took some time before the music lived up to the creation myth. The Flaming Lips were always blessed with the type of origin story that could have been lifted from a comic book – it’s easy to imagine flipping through the pages of The Adventures of Young Wayne Coyne, the tale of a normal kid from Oklahoma whose life was turned upside down when he spied some musical instruments in a church hall and, on a whim, decided to pinch them and start a band. He would later explain the Flaming Lips ethos: “We wanted to sing about shit that we truly didn’t understand, but then we would come up with these lines that cut right to the heart of things.” That was their essence: to find pockets of meaning in the most peculiar places. “You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t,” he howls. “I was born the day they shot JFK / The way you look at me sucks me down the sidewalk / Somebody please tell this machine I’m not a machine,” babbles frontman Wayne Coyne, before suddenly turning into a psych-rock savant who’s stumbled upon some deep, dark secret. Witness the sweet spot they hit on this ramshackle alt-country stomp, from 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. At their very best, though, Oklahoma’s finest have produced wonderful and strange pop music that, for all its oddness, is littered with sublime little truths. They’ve struggled in recent times to produce anything more striking than some by-the-numbers wackiness with Miley Cyrus. Box office: 0161-832 1111.There’s a tendency, in 2016, to think of the Flaming Lips as rather soft-bellied beasts – glitter cannons, confetti explosions and laser-shooting hands. Welcome back, Emperor Zing.Īt Manchester Academy on 22 January. Whether walking over the crowd in his giant plastic ball singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity, donning a strobe-light medallion for The WAND or leading a concerted effort to break the ceiling by screaming “love” ahead of Do You Realize?, Coyne seems reborn, once again dishing out the purest, most potent dose of feelgood psychedelia imaginable. And, of course, Coyne sings Dalek chill-out tune There Should Be Unicorns astride a life-sized prop unicorn, having presumably gone skip-diving at Mariah Carey’s house. On glacial mecha-ballad How?, a crestfallen plea for liberal freedoms that feels all the more hopeless in the face of Donald Trump’s tangerine terror-glare, Coyne sounds as if he’s trapped in one of Coleridge’s pleasure-dome ice caves, while album highlight The Castle resembles a fanfare for fairytale royalty. Songs from their current comedown phase provide amorphous, dream-like counterpoint. The two-hour show includes light-up gongs, psychedelic nudes and gigantic dancing eyeballs beamed in from an alternate universe in which the Residents are playing stadiums.ĭisclaimer: no hallucinogens were abused in the making of this review. For a tender acoustic take on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots: Pt One, he’s flanked by overgrown aliens and goblins and repeatedly hugs an inflatable sun.Ĭome the mangled Beck-in-a-tumble-dryer electro-rock of What Is the Light?, the forest of dot-matrix strings hanging overhead – let’s call them Rapunzel lights – descends to stage level so that Coyne, wandering within them, looks as if he’s showering in sine waves. Photograph: Simone Joyner/RedfernsĪt the opening sci-fi overture of Race for the Prize, the venue explodes with balloons, confetti cannons and rainbow visuals as Coyne – done out like a Tim Burton-Albert Einstein – throws a huge silver balloon sign reading “FUCK YEAH LONDON” into a crowd peppered with Father Christmases. Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne in London.
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