The Flaming Lips

Mon 12th Oct, 2009 in Features

“I’m sorry to interrupt but you have one minute remaining.”

“Alright. OK. Thank you Matthew.”

Matthew?

It takes a moment for me to realise that Wayne Coyne – the Flaming Lips’ evergreen frontman – is on a first-name basis with the conference-call operator; a fact that may seem trivial at first, but really speaks volumes about his “man of the people” persona.

It’s not cultivated either. In our brief 20-minute interview (conducted in late July, just after the Flaming Lips’ Splendour In The Grass bow) Coyne is everything you’d expect from the charismatic band leader that showers his audience with confetti and delivers polemics about the importance of grasping life with two oversized hands. He’s genuine, effusive and, at age 48, still speaks with the unbridled enthusiasm of a teenager who’s just discovered their older siblings’ records.

“When we were growing up, I must’ve been eight or nine or something, we listened to Revolution 9 all the fucking time!” he enthuses after I suggest the band’s new album Embryonic, a sprawling 18-track double disc, reminds me of The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled opus.

The Beatles reference was timely. Just two days after this interview, The Flaming Lips performed at Festival Hall, the site of the Fab Four’s first and only Melbourne performance in 1964.

Where are you at the moment?
We are in Sydney, coming to Melbourne in a couple days.

Is it your day off today?
I guess, but when you travel and get on planes and buses all day it doesn’t feel too free. But in another hour or so my wife [Michelle Martin-Coyne] and I will be free, and we’re here in Sydney, so it’ll be good enough.

Any plans?
We’ll probably just get some food and watch a movie or something and then it’ll be midnight. It kinda goes quicker than you want it to.

How was your first Splendour in the Grass experience.
It was great. We were the last band to play on the last night. Even on Friday, we were there and I thought, “My God, how are they going to keep this up until we play?” I thought by the time we played they would be so wasted that they’d have gone home. But they were crazy! The word that we used was “zonked out”. Whatever ecstasy was going around that little beach was potent … To me, it seemed like the youngest audience of that magnitude, probably 20,000 kids or whatever. They all seemed to be under 22 years old. There was a lot of energy and insanity. MGMT played before us. It was insane for them and doubly insane for us.

Do you think you’re more suited to the festival circuit?
During the summertime, you can play all around the world. Everybody is putting on some crazy festival somewhere. We didn’t like it that much in the beginning because it’s a lot of stress and it doesn’t sound very good. We’re used to playing to 200 people and you have to go there and play to 50,000 or 100,000 people, so you just feel completely out of your element.

But in time – we’ve been around for about 26 years now – you get to the point where you think, “Yeah, we can do that if we do these sorts of things.” We have this over-the-top ridiculous show, so I do think that if you’ve watched 12 bands that day, by the time we come on at the end of the night … people are like, “Look! This guy is pouring blood on his head and he has giant hands!” It becomes a relief or another element of the day. I think it works for us. We like doing all this stuff anyway. We’d do it if no-one showed up.

In a way you were doing it in the ‘80s, but on a smaller scale.
We had our guitars and our amplifiers and the first thing we bought after that were smoke machines and strobe lights. We’d literally stand in our practice space, turn on the smoke machines and strobe lights and jam out. Of course, it’s about music but it’s also about creating this world that you want to be in… All groups do that in a way. It’s not ever really just about listening to music. It’s about being in this place, this time, with these people saying these things, doing these things, being these things.

I think a lot of bands forget that.
Some groups think they’re so fantastic anyway that the audience is lucky to watch them tie their shoe. But most of the really great groups know that there’s a spectacle element to it. Music with visuals, with personality, with intense experiences – it’s one of the best things ever. No one ever really goes to a concert and says, “I listened to Nine Inch Nails”, or, “I listened to U2.” It’s, “I saw them. I saw The Rolling Stones.” And you want to. You don’t want to just listen.

When you’re listening in your car driving to work, that’s one experience. But to be at a concert and to think that you’re not having every sense available, being assaulted by stuff, to me is a waste of an opportunity. Even a five-star restaurant. It’s not just about the food. It’s about the table, the atmosphere, the car park, the service. Even though people say it’s always about the thing, it’s always about everything. When we go to play it’s about everything. I want it to be as good, as intense, as over-the-top, as meaningful, as emotional as it can be.

You could say the same thing about your records in the sense that you throw everything into them.
Obviously these things must be some reflection of our mind set. All good art, bad art, insignificant art, or whatever you want to call it, comes out of something within your uncontrollable subconscious. If we weren’t drawn to these things, we wouldn’t do them…We just simply surrender to whatever dumb ideas come out of our brains.

We’re lucky because there is a certain curiosity and energy. We never make a record and think, “Oh, look how great we are.” It’s always, “We made that one, but what are we going to do next?” It’s the curse of the curious explorer: you’re temporarily satisfied and then you want to move on. In some ways that makes for some strange musical moments. We don’t really know what we’re doing, so we’re always fumbling around with new sounds, new instruments, new arrangements, new approaches.

In that sense what do you make of [US music writer] Jim DeRogatis’ comments that your set-list has become a bit stale?
He’s probably seen us play 300 times and I would say, “Well, Jim. We’re not just playing to you.” People who know him, know his ego is like, “You shouldn’t play what the fans want. You should play what I want!” We tell him all the time that when we play to 20,000 people we know what they want to hear. And it’s not stale to them because they haven’t seen us play a thousand times. A lot of people only see us every five or six years. In some way he probably gets a kick out of being able to say that. He probably thinks he’s more important than he is, but that’s fine [laughs]. A lot of writers are like that. I think that’s what makes it funny.

Did you leave an angry message on his machine?
No, I would never do that. It was Ryan Adams who did that, wasn’t it?

Yeah.
He’ll talk about it like, “This asshole. Look what he did.” But he loves that sort of stuff. He loves the attention. I don’t care that much. I’m glad he likes us, but I’m not overjoyed. I’m slightly disappointed if he doesn’t like us, but it doesn’t kill me. I pretty much stay in the middle. I’m only doing this because I like it, and if Jim doesn’t like it, well…

So with such a huge back catalogue, how do you pick a set-list that appeals to everyone?
Well, it’s funny. We just did the Pitchfork festival in Chicago about a week ago [July 17-19] and it was a little bit of a dilemma. Dependant on which blog you go to or which Flaming Lips fanatic you talk to, it could be a different list of 20 songs. But Pitchfork did this kind of thing [“Write The Night”] where you could vote on the songs that you wanted to hear the most. We said whatever that list is, we’d play it … And it was the songs we played every night anyway. We already knew that in a sense. We weren’t just playing these songs because we thought they were great. We knew the response they would get. So I guess we were surprised, but I don’t know why we were surprised because we play to our audience every night. We know what they like.

We’ve made records since 1984 [but] we don’t have that many fans in the audience that are as old as me. I’m almost 50 years old and most of our fans are in their early 20s. If you were born in 1984 you probably will listen to music in the time that you were alive. We run into kids all the time that were born in 1990. The world before them was kinda like, “That’s not my world, fuck it.” I was born in 1961. For me, the world before then was not my life. But maybe I’m lucky that I was born in the ‘60s, and the ‘60s has a lot of fucking cool music anyway [laughs].

You aired a couple of new songs [ Convinced of the Hex and Silver Trembling Hands ] at Splendour In The Grass. How did they go down?
Well, it’s hard to say. We want to play these new songs just so we have some gauge of what we’ll do with them. Sometimes playing in front of people you can arrive at a different intensity or a different kind of meaning. When we started to play Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots [Pt 1] when that came out, I never thought that much about its meaning. I remember singing it in front of an audience and it occurred to me that this song was about a friend believing in another friend: “When things go bad, I still believe in you.” I know it seems like it would be obvious, but for me it was a trippy cartoonish song to sing. And so I think in some ways, we want to do that, we want to see where the intensity is.

When you do new songs you’re so caught up in your own performance that you can’t even remember what the audience thought of it. As we play more of the brand new stuff over the next few months, we’ll become a little bit more removed from it… A part of me is a musician and to play new music is exciting; to play these things that you’ve been thinking about in the recent past as opposed to something that’s been around since 1993. That doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy playing that, it’s just a different experience. Our audience is so loving and so forgiving and hip and progressive, I’m sure they know the songs already.

I had a good chance to listen to the album today and it almost sounds like it’s your White Album, where every song is its own little entity.
Well, thank you. I think that’s a compliment. There is something about being able to make a double record that makes you not focus on this 10- or 11-song arc. I guess that’s what we were hoping for. The White Album’s got John Lennon’s Revolution 9 on it, and I remember when I was growing up – and still now – I run into people who say, “Well, The White Album would’ve been a great single record but it’s got all that stuff on there. Who needs Revolution 9?”

When we were growing up, I must’ve been eight or nine or something, we listened to Revolution 9 all the fucking time! We never thought of it as an experimental thing, just some tripped-out music about death and the mysteries of life, or whatever. We listened to it as much as we listened to all the other Beatles songs. It never occurred to us that it was a weird b-side…In my mind I wanted that same freedom, or that same ridiculousness, or that platform by which you can do different stuff and not be judged on just one style. You can say, “Fuck it. We’re just gonna do whatever comes out of our minds.”

I was thinking too that finishing [Coyne’s film] Christmas On Mars after seven years might’ve opened the creative floodgates.
Well, I don’t know about that…There were elements of making Christmas on Mars that were overwhelming, but a lot of it was utter freedom, because you could just do whatever you wanted. We never thought of it as having to be rock’n’roll or weird or anything. Any way that we could do it, we did it. Even now when we think about it I forget that it’s finished and I don’t have to work on it. I got so used to having this little project that, at the end of the day, I could say, “Oh, I wanna come home and do this next scene for Christmas On Mars.” Now, secretly, I’m working on another movie in my mind, which I’m sure I’ll begin in a couple years and get caught up in it all over again.

Did working on the movie change your perspective on making Embryonic?
I don’t know if it changed it. I knew going into making Christmas on Mars that it was a big undertaking, but I always felt like I wasn’t that worried about – even if it failed. As Christmas on Mars went on, I had that bravery and that confidence of saying, “You know, I don’t have to make the greatest movie ever. The movie I should make should be the one that climbs out of my subconscious.” If anything, that probably changed me a little bit. You can’t really ever second guess what anybody’s going to like.

The best thing you can do is be true to your own internal weirdness. If felt like, if I did exactly what I wanted to do, The Flaming Lips audience would think, “There you go. We gave you the freedom, we gave you the money, we gave you all this stuff. Don’t be a poser. Don’t try to calculate it. Just be the weirdo we want you to be.” So maybe it did change me in a way. It showed me that I should follow that. That’s what they want me to do, and that’s what I want to do anyway.

And I guess at the end of it all, you have a double album to show for it too.
Well, in a sense maybe you’re right. Maybe that [ Christmas on Mars ] really did free us up. But don’t get me wrong, the minute we get done with something, you’re always scared and insecure that you ruined everything…But there is a thrill of getting caught up in the moment. Getting caught up in these ideas and believing in them so much that you can just barrel through eight or nine of them before you’re doubting yourself again. All artists do that. Even Prince at one point would think, “Do I look weird up there dancing around?” [Laughs]

It’s a really dark album as well.
It is in some ways. I know what you mean. We kept going back to this colouring, these minor chords, these strange little progressions that I know to some people will give it a more somber shade. I know we do talk about the nature of evil.

I can’t quite tell what’s going on with all the songs, but there’s some desire for the main character to become animalistic again and really feel love and pleasure as opposed to judging it all the time. I hope in the end, especially with the very last song … I think it feels very triumphant. That we’ve come to some resolution about what the record is about. And it feels like we will win. That life is grand. That beauty is still beauty. And the truth is still truth.

Embryonic is out Friday 16 October on Warner Music.