“I’m just trying to remember which festival was Forbidden Fruit, you know?”

Having fronted psychedelic rock surrealists The Flaming Lips for more than three decades, Wayne Michael Coyne has probably played more international music festivals than Keith Richards has had blood transfusions. So much so that, although the acclaimed Oklahoma band appeared at Forbidden Fruit just a couple of years ago, the singer is struggling to recall it precisely.
“I mean, we do a lot of festivals and they’ve all got really cool names,” the 53-year-old rocker riffs. “Everybody else in the band remembers except me, because I’m always running around just talking to everybody – and then suddenly we play, and then I’m talking to everybody again. So I’m trying to remember. Give me something that will make me think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Forbidden Fruit!’”
Well, it’s a great festival that takes place in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham, just outside Dublin city centre. And you ended up rolling around the crowd in a giant plastic bubble.
“Oh yeah, got it!” he laughs. “That’s what I thought actually. I just wasn’t sure if it was in some weird spot, somewhere else in Ireland. But that was a great day.”
And by the sound of things, this one is going to be even better. But first: Flaming Lips did a show where they supported Bob Dylan in Kilkenny. It’s one that Coyne remembers vividly – though not necessarily for positive reasons. In a Rolling Stone interview last year, he committed the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll blasphemy of labelling Dylan a ‘curmudgeon’, complaining that he never interacted with his support acts. “You would think Bob Dylan would just be back amongst all the trailers jamming his acoustic guitar trying to keep warm with us,” he said. “That’s the story, but that’s not the way it is. It’s weird and that’s the truth. What can you do?”
So is he still down on Dylan? Is the man really a curmudgeon?
“Well, there’s worse things to be called when you’re 70-years old,” Coyne laughs. “But I think that as festival experiences go, we’ve played with guys like Jackson Browne and Pete Townshend. Maybe they’re not quite in the same echelon as Dylan, but they’d be close. And they’re very normal dudes, you know, hanging around, interested in music. And you go backstage and they’re just people.
“It’s a myth that the reason Bob Dylan tours so much is because he’s this travelling troubadour who just loves playing music and being around people and all that. But I don’t know him at all, really. That was just my experience.”
Whatever about Dylan, even after 31 years playing together, Wayne and his bandmates still love what they do.
“I think I’m lucky that The Flaming Lips, unlike someone like Bob Dylan, are always embracing something that is new and exciting to us,” he says. “We get to go out and do our thing. Hopefully that would be a truism of anybody’s life: regardless of how long you’ve been doing it, you hope that you’re still finding a way to enjoy it, or maybe you’re knowing, more and more, how to enjoy it. I would say that’s true of The Flaming Lips. I mean, we’re lucky.”
Lucky, of course, is only part of it. Because the truth is that The Flaming Lips work hard at keeping things interesting. Although it’s since been broken by country singer Hunter Hayes, in 2012 the band set the Guinness World Record for the most concerts played in multiple cities in 24 hours (they managed eight; Hayes subsequently played twelve).
“That was connected to an awards ceremony,” Wayne explains. “So during this long day and night, they’re announcing awards and things like that. It was for VH1, and I think MTV was involved. I don’t know if I’d want to do it too many more times: maybe in another five years I’d do it again or something.
“But yeah, everything was outrageous, it was fun: musically it was very cool, you know, very fucked up. It was a tough challenge for every show to really be something. I felt that there were times when the music suffered. It’s difficult because you only have a couple of moments and if you spend, like, five minutes to fix up an amplifier that’s shocking somebody, everything gets fucked up. It was bits like that that you couldn’t control. Still, it really was fun.”
One of the world’s hardest-working live acts, they’ve been touring their unusually dark and twisted thirteenth studio album, The Terror, solidly for the last year. However, Coyne assures me that the set-list for their Forbidden Fruit show will feature some hot audio and visual surprises.
“Well, we’ve got this great, weird kind of unseen freaky video stuff,” he explains. “I don’t even know what to call it. The guy, who’s been doing our giant video screens with us for a while, has invented this new kind of string video, and we have almost five or six hundred of them now. We’re attempting to bring them over.
“I think, on the Monday after Forbidden Fruit, we take them to a Miley Cyrus concert in Manchester, so we’re going to see how well it all works, not just on UK power, but all around the world, you know? I think people will be blown away – we’ve expanded the set from just being so much of The Terror, because we’ve been doing that for a year. Now there’s quite a bit of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, including some songs that we’ve never played before.”
There’s also been a line-up change, to add to the mounting intrigue. This, one senses, might just be Flaming Lips best ever Irish show...
“We’ve got two new drummers – well, one of them is a drummer and one of them is kind of a percussionist, who’s playing electronic kit sounds along with the drummer. I don’t want to say it will be better than ever, because we’ve always had fantastic shows – mostly because we have such a great audience. But anybody that knows our catalogue will just go, ‘Wow, they played this song, and that song!’
“With this new ensemble – a new drummer and a new percussionist– it’s going to be fucking amazing. I got some new toys and stuff. I don’t know if I want to speak about them because there’s always health and safety people reading what I talk about and then meeting me at the show – so sometimes it’s better to surprise them!”
Agreed...

Hugely anticipated as it is, this trip to Europe is not without controversy. The Flaming Lips have had many line-up changes over their long history, but no musician’s departure from the band has been as bitter as the recent sacking of drummer Kliph Scurlock. In an increasingly hostile war of words, Scurlock claimed that he was fired two months ago, because he’d publicly criticised Coyne’s close friend, Pink Pony singer Christina Fallin, who was accused of racism after she wore a Native American headdress in a photo shoot.
Scurlock maintained that Coyne was suffering a mid-life crisis in the aftermath of his messy divorce – his wife Michelle Martin-Coyne, 45, petitioned for divorce in September on the legal grounds of incompatibility. In addition, Scurlock said his time with the band was often fraught with discord. He claimed to have endured verbal abuse and even threats of physical abuse from the frontman.
Coyne himself sees it all quite differently.
“Well, Kliph had become a little bit less significant in the group over the past couple of years,” he states. “I don’t think he cared about some of the music that we were doing. Kliph was primarily a musician that played with us live – we didn’t really work very much with him in the studio. I think he only appeared on a couple of songs anyway. And that’s just the way it worked.
“I mean, Steven [Drozd] is such a fantastic drummer. It would be intimidating for anyone to come in there and think that we need something else anyway. You know? I think Kliph just got less and less interested in what we were doing and, towards the end, we sort of felt like, ‘Let’s just start to work with these other guys’. These other guys work with us anyway, and they’re our friends, and they live here. Kliph lives five hours away, and even if we wanted to throw together something like we’re doing tonight – a little video shoot – it would be a big hassle or whatever. It seemed that this would work out much better for us musically. There’s a difference as people get older: sometimes, they become a little bit more saturated with who they are. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve just become more open and curious and it’s interesting to work with someone like a Kesha or a Miley Cyrus. Their ideas are very fresh and cool and wonderful to me.
“I know Kliph did not like the way we did things, like cover a Stone Roses album in our studio, so I’m thinking, ‘Okay, well don’t be part of it then!’ Little by little, those things all added up. Like, ‘We’ll just get someone who’s more interested in what we’re doing’. It wasn't a very big deal.”
Having said that, Coyne is clearly unhappy about all the negative publicity.
“Some of the things that Kliph said in the press are just absolute lies, stemming from his anger at being fired,” he fumes. “I don’t know how anybody can take them seriously. He knows that it’s just a lie, you know? I suspect a drunken, ranting lie! I mean, I don’t even always know what it is he’s saying because he says so much, you know? There’s a lot of hate. But good for us: we’re playing with some people who love music, who love playing in Flaming Lips, love playing in the band, love having new adventures and new creations and things. As I say, good for us!”
One of the people the Lips have been collaborating with in recent times is pop superstar, Miley Cyrus. How did that come about?
“Miley is a freak by anybody’s standard,” he laughs. “She said even three or four years ago, when she was still considered ‘Hannah Montana’, that she was a big Flaming Lips fan. I’ve known that for a while. It must have just being something in our music, or something that she perceived about us, that she reached out to us and said, ‘Hey, maybe we should do some music together’.
“I was like, ‘No shit, I think you’re great! I think you’re crazy!’ It was mostly just that. She sent me a really nice birthday greeting on her Twitter. Everybody in the world noticed it except for me, at first. Then I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I felt like I’ll just respond and say, ‘Hey, give me a call’. A few moments later we were connecting and immediately talked about doing some music and being part of her show and Steven and I were both like ‘cool’. We liked her anyway. She’s such a great ‘I don’t give a fuck’ sort of personality. And that really is true, when you're around her: she’s really a wonderful kind of freak. “She’s beautiful and she’s cool to all of her people. I’ve been around other big, big stars like that and, whatever you think about them musically, there’s always a little bit of the navigating the bodyguards and the limousines and stuff, and she is absolutely not about any of that. You wouldn’t know that she’s one of the biggest stars in the world.
“Just about two hours ago, we were talking about getting ready to do a show with her in Manchester, where we’re gonna sing ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ as part of the Sgt. Pepper's remake I’m doing with a bunch of my friends. We did ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ with Sean Lennon earlier and we did a recorded version that has Miss Cyrus on it – and she wanted to see if we could do this song at her show in Manchester.
“I forget what awards ceremony it’s for, but it’s a big one,” he continues. “She decided she was going to do this song, and we have to take over a bunch of stuff, lights and costumes and things and she texted me saying: ‘Make sure you bring enough of that silver confetti, I know last time you bought a box, but I don’t want to run out.’”
He laughs: “She’s just like me! You’re always thinking about the show. You’re always thinking, ‘We wanna make this as good as we can’. No one in the world would ever dream that Miley Cyrus would be thinking, ‘We need another box of that silver confetti because I don’t want it to run out!’”
Coyne says that he was totally unaware of Miley’s infamous Twitter spat with Sinéad O’Connor. However, given the gist of it, he laughs at the notion that the young American singer isn’t making her own decisions.
“I won’t say names because the more I say names the more I get in trouble,” he smiles. “I’ve been around much lesser stars than Miley Cyrus, who are complete fucking horrible pains in the ass and are as fake as they come. Miley is just not like that. She’s doing her thing.
“If you like her music, it’s because of her. If you don’t like her music, it’s because of her. If you go to her show and like it, it’s because of her. She’s cool. If people think I’m part of this ‘music industry tool’ by being part of her show, they just have no idea what really happens. She’s an easy target for all of that kind of stupid hate, as I’ve become, sometimes.
It’s easy to hate me because we’re out there
doing stuff.”
Another big American star who seems to have taken an occasional leaf out of The Flaming Lips’ book is Lady Gaga.
“Well, I don’t know her, but I’d love to meet her. Her music doesn’t speak to me in that same sense that, when I think of pop music, I purposely follow Coldplay or Miley Cyrus or something. But I would love to meet her.
“I live in a very conservative Bible-belt city, and Oklahoma City has always had a pretty big gay population. For the way Oklahoma City is, I’ve always been surprised at how little violence and how little attention the gay community gets because it’s a big piece of the city here. When Gaga came, there was such a joyous energy, everywhere I went for a couple of weeks. I’m always around a lot of freaks, and there’s always some element of gay people being around us, virtually all the time – and it was just joyous. It’s like Santa Claus came to town and people were talking and laughing about it for weeks before and weeks after; that’s fucking awesome.
“Like I say, I don’t know her music that well. I know the popular stuff and I know the stories. I’m glad to be associated with someone like that. Someone who’s saying, ‘I’m not against anything. I just want to do my thing’.”

He may have disappointed many people – but how does a fully-fledged freak like Coyne rate President Obama’s performance so far?
“Well, I think he’s our guy. It’s hard to remember just how ridiculous and embarrassing and barbaric and backwards it felt to be an American previous to Obama, because that was during the George Bush times. To know that someone like Bush was elected twice is almost unthinkable now – but it did happen and history stands.
“But to have someone as superior and kind and presidential as President Obama is as ‘the next thing’ is still hard to believe,” he continues. “There were times when I thought he may win the presidency then say, ‘I don’t know if I really want it because some of it is so hateful and you have to endure so much of that’. I think his life would probably be better spent doing something wonderful every day, instead of having to pick fights with these dumbass Republicans all the time. But I think he’s the greatest thing that’s happened to America in a long, long time. I wish he could be re-elected 100 times.”
Was he pleased to see the marijuana legislation passed in Colorado and Washington?
“Yeah, of course,” he laughs. “This is the way that all sensible people will approach something as harmless as marijuana. I’ve lived with marijuana my whole life now. When I was 16-years old and actually selling it, I thought, ‘I better start selling now because in a couple of years it’s gonna be legal’. Even myself, at 16, I thought, there can’t be any reason why this thing stays illegal.
“Here we are, over 30 years later, and it’s still illegal, but not everywhere. But I hold out hope that this will be the beginning, and the collapse won’t take 50 more years. The collapse will take another couple of years and everyone will wake up and go, ‘What were we thinking?’”
When can the world expect a new Flaming
Lips album?
“Well, we don’t ever really know what the fuck we’re doing, to tell you the truth,” he sighs. “We have this side-project called Electric Worms coming out in a couple of months. So, expect some great freaky new music that’s called Electric Worms. Some people will hear similarities to the Flaming Lips, mainly because it’s the Flaming Lips who are making it. It’s me, Steven and a group of musicians that we know from Nashville.
“I say Nashville, but you hear them and you wouldn’t know they’re from Nashville. They sound like they’re from outer-space. We sound like we’re from outer-space, but they sound like they’re from further out in outer-space (laughs).
“I think you’ll love it, it’s like prog rock meets punk rock meets freak rock meets... just some beautiful, beautiful music. Steven does a cover of this song by the group Yes called ‘Heart Sunrise’ and it literally makes you cry, it’s so powerful. So that’s coming out.
“We’ve also got this Sgt. Pepper's remake that we’re doing with a bunch of our friends. And, as always, as we’re going, we’re working on new Flaming Lips music. We always make so much music and then we realise: ‘Oh, let’s keep that one and we’ll develop it into something else’. So that’s always moving along.”
Watch these spacers…

Flaming Lips play Forbidden Fruit on the Saturday