Shooting from the lip

He had us all worried there for a while. Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne was the first Electric Picnic headline artist due to visit the packed Hot Press chatroom, but almost half an hour after the scheduled ETA, there was still no sign of this charming man in the white suit with the Shakespeare hair and weirdy beard.
Clipboards were consulted, watches checked, feet shuffled, portaloos visited – but eventually he showed, fresh from watching Goldfrapp, diffusing the tension with the mile-wide smile of a candidate in some alternative presidential campaign as dreamed up by Philip K Dick by way of Stanley Kubrick.
It was an interesting time to catch Mr. Coyne. Nearing the completion of the forthcoming Flaming Lips record, plus his long-awaited sci-fi shoestring epic Christmas On Mars, there was a sense that he and his bandmates had beamed into the Picnic, blinking and bleary from the recesses of various bunker studios and editing rooms. However, the release of Bradley Beasley’s cracked, candid and often moving FL documentary Fearless Freaks afforded plenty of retrospective opportunities. Yours truly took the interview chair and solicited questions from the floor, while Coyne, with the aplomb of a chatshow host, did the rest. Here are the edited highlights…
Wayne Coyne: My apologies…I was over watching Goldfrapp. It was good, but I swear I didn’t know this was happening now, otherwise I would have been here, so I’m sorry.
Peter Murphy: So how were Goldfrapp?
I hadn’t seen them before. I don’t know if it’s true but I heard that she (Alison Goldfrapp) occassionally gets mad and runs offstage after a couple of songs, and I was: "Shit, I’d better get over there, because if she gets mad at all these drunk Irish people and runs off stage…" But it was good. I was surprised.
Did she indulge in the theremin?
Yes.
You got your money’s worth then.
Yeah, I like the way she plays the theremin. Do you think people know how she plays the theremin? I play the theremin, and usually it’s on a stand and you do the "woooooooh" thing, right? But she has a portable theremin device and she uses parts of her body to make the feel, the contact. And she’ll start off using her hands and then she’ll use her boobs, and then her crotch…
It makes you want to be reborn as one.
I hadn’t thought about it ’til you said it but yeah, you’re right. But not my theremin, her theremin.
You’re in the middle of recording the next album. Will there be any new material in the set tonight?
We never play new songs that the audience hasn’t heard. I saw Husker Du play in 1986. I’d never seen them, I went to watch them play the songs that I knew and loved, and they decided to play nothing but their new record. When I toured with them I talked to Bob Mould about that, and he said, "Well, you play what you feel most energetic and passionate about," and that to me is legitimate, but we really love all our of our music equally, and I don’t feel like we ever have to play what our agenda is. We play whatever we think the audience wants to hear. So even though we have a bunch of new songs, our new record will probably come out in February or March, we would never feel compelled to play something brand new that no one knows.
It’s funny – most bands start out with a DIY ethic and a very tightly controlled environment, then they sign to a record label and get loads of money and employ roadies and slowly surrender that control. The Flaming Lips always did things differently. I remember going to an Olympia gig around 1999 and being astonished to see you wandering around the stage fiddling with equipment before the show started.
Admittedly that is a more European, or English, sensibility where the audience is just the audience, and the performers are just performers, and at some point they’ll meet and you’ll clap and they’ll go home to snort cocaine and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But really in America, it isn’t such an absurd image to think, "Oh there’s the band, they come out, they tune their guitars, they plug in their amps." I think in some sense it probably works to our advantage now, especially at festivals like this where I go out there and say, "Hello everybody, we’re The Flaming Lips and we’re going to play, but we have to set up our equipment."
But what this does is it sort of robs the audience of one of these great traditional rock and roll moments – the entrance. I remember seeing the Rolling Stones in 1981 and when Mick Jagger and Keith and the fellas walked on stage it was like, "That was the best thing". And I don’t want to rob The Flaming Lips audience of one of these moments, so I say, "Look, now you know we’re out here right now, and we kind of blew that for everybody, but we’re going to leave the stage and we’re going to pretend like you haven’t seen us, we’re going to walk on and you guys just go ape-shit and I swear, even though it will be fake, it will feel just about as real as the real thing." And it is. I mean, we all know this is all kind of ritualistic stuff, and I think that’s why it works so well.
Your live show has changed a lot since the mid-’90s. You’ve evolved from this scuzzy little death-rock band into a kind of space-aged pantomime.
Yeah. I enjoy being in the audience as much as I enjoy being on the stage, so there’s certain elements that I always think: "I wish a band would do something like that. Well, why don’t we do that?" I remember a year and a half ago at the Coachella festival in America – it’s a huge festival and it’s organised as well as a festival could be, but bands were literally throwing their equipment up there as fast as they could, and I had taken that ridiculous space bubble up there.
(Flaming Lips concerts frequently begin with Wayne climbing inside a transparent inflatable bubble which is then passed around the crowd – PM).
But I simply did it because I thought, "Wouldn’t it be great if one of the performers acted as if they descended from space in a giant bubble?" And then I thought: "To expect Black Francis to do it is too much. Well fuck, I guess we should do it."
How do you get into that thing?
It’s a pretty well-made device. You get in there and it zips from the inside and has a bunch of velcro flaps that you seal, and then you get a leaf-blower which blows at about 200 mph. It’s pretty scary really. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anybody. I think it’s like when people walk on hot coals. You feel that if you go fast enough and don’t worry about it too much it’ll probably work out; you sort of look out into space and just trudge on. That’s how it’s worked so far.
There is an element of being on stage, and when the music starts to play and the audience goes crazy, that does give you a fearlessness and a confidence. Even in the early ‘80s, we used to carry fireworks around with us. You’re supposed to take them outside and they blow way up in the air. Well, we’d take them into these shows and there would be sometimes 25-30 people in these shows, and in the frenzy of being up there on stage, you just become a different person, and we’d literally blow the fireworks up in the venue, right there with us. And the audience would like it. And later on at the hotel room, we tried to do the same thing without the frenzy of being possessed by whatever it is that rock’n’roll does, and we couldn’t do it, we were just like, "Oh no! It’ll shoot your eye out." It can shoot your eye out at the venue but you don’t care, you just think when rock’n’roll is happening you can do anything you want. And we did.
Tell us about the film you’re making, Christmas On Mars. This has been in me works for quite a while.
Right, since the beginning of 2001, so it will be five years in the making by the time I finish it. The shoot that I’m doing in September in Oklahoma City will finish up all the initial filming, and we’ve been doing some editing and the music for it all along. But probably about this time next year, we’ll say that it’s finished. We’ll probably put it out on the Internet as we finish it scene by scene, and start to see what people think of it. I think that sometimes is the best way to find out how your art and stuff is doing, let the audience tell you.
Watching The Flaming Lips documentary Fearless Freaks, I was surprised at how much bigger than the band the story was. A lot of your contemporaries starting out in the ‘80s were from college or art-school backgrounds, whereas you grew up in fairly poverty-stricken circumstances.
No, I mean, not poverty, we weren’t as poor as you can be, we knew people that were poorer than us. I never thought that we were poor, until I got out in the world later and realised there were three of us sleeping in the same room. But luckily, my dad always worked a bunch, and within him I saw the experience of a guy who just gets up and goes to work – which I think is the work ethic of The Flaming Lips even now. And through my mother, I saw this undefeatable, sometimes bordering on retarded, sense of optimism.
Your brothers are an amazing bunch of people…
Yeah, my brothers are fucking crazy. The Super-8 footage, that was the home-movie capture back then. My brother got my older sister to stand on the sidelines while we played these football games, which were really just an excuse to organise gang fights, because my brothers never played sports but they loved the sort of Evil Knieval aspect of playing a game of some kind. So we would get out there and take off our shirts and play in nothing but our shorts, and I swear to God, we would be in the huddle planning our over-head hand-off pass or whatever, and my brothers would be smoking joints in the huddle. Nowadays, drug testing and sports go hand in hand! But my older brothers wanted an intense life, and I think that’s what I inherited from them: the desire for "More life, motherfuckers!"
Our friend Brad Beasley made the movie, he’s made a lot of good documentaries. He saw these things within our story. There’s a scene where I revisit the restaurant that I worked at from the time I was 16 ’til I guess I was 30 or so, Long John Silver’s. It was a fast-food fried fish joint. There’s not very many of them left in America, but it was meant to mimic the fish and chip places that are so popular in the UK. So I was 16, maybe 17 years old. We had gotten robbed. Some guys came in with big guns…
Audience member: Get on the floor motherfuckers!
He said, "Get on the floor motherfuckers!" not to you guys, that was a reference to me getting robbed in the movie. We were just about to close down, they broke in through the back door and they had these giant guns, and I’m just a young guy thinking, "My whole life is ahead of me. There’ve been robberies all around Oklahoma City and people have gotten killed." And it was a real devastating blow to my mortality, you know, when you’re young you think you’re going to live forever.
So we lay on the floor and these guys got their $400 or whatever was in the safe, and we all stood up with this renewed value of what it really meant to be young and to be alive. And I swear to God, I would have never known what life was unless I lay there on the floor thinking, "This is what happens to you, you’re just a dumb, young fry cook one minute, and someone breaks in and blows your head off. The world’s full of so many people, why would my life be any more significant than anybody else’s?" And I thought, "Wow! This is really how it ends." But it didn’t end, luckily for me, Peter.
You have been writing songs about death and love ever since though.
I believe Bradley saw that within me. In the movie we revisited Long John Silver’s, which is now a Vietnamese restaurant, because in 1985 a lot of the boat people came to Oklahoma City and now we have this marvellous Vietnamese community. But I went in there and the mom and the dad don’t speak very much English, but the young son and the daughter do, and I got them to play the part of me laying on the floor. I thought it was just the dumbest thing ever, but Bradley, because he’s this insightful film-maker, thought, "The audience is going to see this and think this is the greatest thing." And isn’t he right? So it has all these nice little moments that a rock band would never think to impart.
That incident throws some light on a song like ‘Do You Realise?’, which seems life-affirming at first, but the underlying message is “someday we’re all going to die”.
I was doing an interview an hour ago, and we were talking about, sometimes you’re driving down the road and you see a sunset, and you’re there with your friend and you say, "That’s a good sunset today, isn’t it, Peter?" And you’d say, "Well, Wayne, it’s pretty good, yeah." And it is marvellous, but sometimes if you say that within a framework of a song or a movie, all of our lives can take on this epic, biblical significance. It isn’t like the great things (only) happen to the big, important people, these great things happen to all of us, but we have to be aware that it’s happening for it to mean anything to us.
That’s a hard thing to express in a four-minute song.
There’s things that are abstract about being almost ridiculously optimistic that it’s hard to take it serious or be real about it, and I think a lot of artists don’t portray optimism in the right way. It all becomes flag-waving and sloganeering or whatever, and so I do sometimes think in the framework of our songs, we try to remind people that it can be a real thing. In the face of things that could be devastating or could defeat you, there are ways to be happy.
The human spirit is a really a resilient, marvellous thing, and it’s not fake and it’s not just there in a poem or song. And occasionally, within a song, you can say something like, "Everyone you know someday will die", which is a pretty brutal awkening to some people, to think, "Here I am with my friends and we’re drunk and fuck, what do we care man, we’re going to live forever." And then have this old man tell you: "You know kid, you, all your friends, everybody that you’re here with, are all going to be dead someday.”
That’d sober you up kinda sharpish.
But I don’t mean it in a bad way, I mean it to say: "Look, make this count, because I’m telling you from my own experience that you don’t get a second chance with a lot of that. These people that are with you today, these could be people that you know from when you were five, and you might know them until you’re 95, that’s a great, awesome thing, but make sure you’re aware of it, because sometimes things happen and you don’t know how great it was and it slips by you." And I think sometimes within the framework of music you can point that out, and it’s believable because the power of music kinda does that.
Pics: Graham Keogh