The Flaming Lips have a reputation to uphold. Legend has it they were signed after a record label rep caught a show where they almost burnt down the venue “with some questionable on-stage pyrotechnics”. They came up with the “headphone concert” more than 20 years ago, transmitting their live performance to audiences wearing headphones. They’ve released music on flash drives embedded inside gummies, a 24-hour song streamed on a non-stop loop, and one album across four discs intended to be played simultaneously.
Over the years, they’ve shared their stage with fantastical inflatable creatures resembling wolves, butterflies, and slugs, plus a UFO big enough to feature in Star Wars. Singer Wayne Coyne has fired lasers from giant rubbery hands, strapped puffy white wings to his back, and crowd surfed inside a bubble (not all simultaneously — yet).
So expectations are high as The Flaming Lips take to the stage at the O2 Forum Kentish Town. They don’t disappoint — visually, musically, or, least of all, emotionally.
Clearly, the concept of holding back is completely foreign to the band. Within the first four songs they’ve fired up the confetti cannons, lasers, smoke machines, and blow-up rainbow; when not inside his bubble, Coyne’s shot off streamers and danced with a towering robot (during Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, of course); and the six men on the overcrowded stage have already performed two of their biggest hits: Yoshimi and Do You Realize??.
They’re only warming up. Over the next 90 minutes, while the confetti keeps coming and multi-instrumentalist Stephen Drozd leads the musicians through one feel-good psychedelic anthem after another, Coyne plays the ultimate ringmaster of this psychedelic circus.
Impeccably dressed in a snappy suit, he doesn’t just angelically deliver lyrics like “She puts diamonds on her forehead, They remind her how the animals and, Trees and insects call”. Particularly chatty tonight, he’s here to explain songs in typically esoteric terms: the hypnotic Always There In Our Hearts is, to paraphrase, about the battle between our free will and genetic predetermination; the “mystically magic” Dinosaurs On The Mountain attempts to recapture the innocence of childhood, which, Coyne reveals, is encapsulated in Drozd’s guitar solo.
He marvels at and spins a fine yarn about a flying robot bird before letting it soar (briefly) over the audience, only adding to the stakes as he narrates its failure to flap back to the stage before a truly sublime rendition of My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion.
And he’s a bonafide cheerleader, encouraging the audience to keep cheering way longer than even Robbie Williams might; graciously and repeatedly thanking everyone for turning out (especially those who’ve had tickets for tonight’s postponed show “since 1975”); and frequently promising to deliver the band’s best show ever. Before lyrically bleaker songs, like the masterful Waitin’ For A Superman, he even asks the crowd to keep the sorrow at bay.
The Flaming Lips needn’t worry — nothing could dilute the absolute joy inside the Forum tonight. This is the kind of show where Coyne leads the audience in singing Happy Birthday to a fan celebrating the day at their 62nd Lips gig. This is the kind of show where the band bring on a 14-year-old fan (Nell Smith) to sing Red Right Hand from the album of Nick Cave covers they recorded together during lockdown.
This is the kind of show where, once it’s over, strangers embrace, partners kiss, and those people lucky enough to salvage one of the balloon letters that spelled out the huge FUCK YEAH LONDON held aloft by Coyne leave the venue with a slightly wider smile than everybody else.
Probably the only person not left feeling totally uplifted by this fully transformative experience is the one who has to sweep up all that confetti.
The Flaming Lips
O2 Forum Kentish Town, London
2nd June 2022
Photo: Simon Reed
- This article originally appeared on Louder Than War.
Nils van der Linden 