Wayne Coyne was barely in his twenties the night he had a gun pointed into his face and was told he was about to die.
Three men – pissed up and pissed off at the world – burst into the fast food diner where the future Flaming Lips front man spent eleven years tossing fish, flipping burgers and cooking fries.
Each was armed with a shotgun. None were interested in the restaurant’s special meal deal.
In the space of just a few moments which have lived with him since, the young Wayne was forced to lie on the ground while a shaking manageress was told to open the safe or the gang would indiscriminately open fire. “I just thought, ‘My God, this is really how you die’,” Wayne later recalled. “Just one minute you’re cooking up someone’s order of French fries and the next minute you’re laying on the floor and they blow your brains out, and there’s no music, there’s no significance, it’s just random.” Wayne Coyne, of course, didn’t die that night on the floor of Long John Silver’s. Lucky for him. Lucky for us.
The Flaming Lips – I Can Be A Frog
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For, nearly thirty years later, The Flaming Lips – Coyne, joined by founding bassist Michael Irvins, drummer Kilph Scurlock and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drodz – is a band that matters, a band that has touched lives, made lives, saved lives.
Continually blurring the lines between the sublime (just listen to 1999’s ‘Waitin’ For A Superman’) and the ridiculous (the SpongeBob SquarePants soundtrack, anyone?), they have, over three decades, eased themselves from semi-legendary drug-whacked psychedelic freaks to near-mythical, elder visionaries of experimental pop perfection. So respected have they become there is a street named after them in their hometown of Oklahoma City, so adored they are regularly said to be the greatest live act on the planet, and so well loved several journalists have labelled them the best American band alive.
Most impressively, though, on the eve of the British release of ‘Embryonic’, the Lips’ remarkable twelfth studio album, they’ve got to this position without ever compromising.
“It still blows my mind that things we create can mean so much to people.”
Without ever chasing the popular vote. Without ever doing anything but sticking resolutely to the band’s one defining motto: ‘Because we could – and nobody stopped us.’ “I still wonder sometimes,” muses forty-eight-year-old Wayne. “How the fuck did that happen?”
Somehow. That’s how.
Much history. Twenty-seven years. Twelve albums. A lot of tales. There’s Jonathan Donahue and Justin Timberlake. There are car park gigs and Kylie covers. There are hummers, needles, and hammers and sickles.
Sometimes it’s told one way. Sometimes another. When you’ve had decades dealing with the same questions from different journalists you probably need to make the answers multiple-choice.
There’s always truth. It’s just there are different truths. Wayne’s words. We’ll unpick our way through it.
It’s The Flaming Lips.
It’s never anything other than a magical journey.
“It still blows my mind that things we create can mean so much to people, it stuns me to think about it. That’s not some kind of false modesty. It’s just such an honour for people to be so passionate about something you’ve done, I find it incredible.”
Wayne Coyne, in his custom three-piece suit, loose bowtie and greying goatee, doesn’t just look like a southern gentleman. He talks like one too.
When he speaks in his trademark hoarse Oklahoman accent, he’s polite, courteous, humble and, above all, incredibly enthusiastic. About everything. Right now, in Barcelona hours before the Lips will open for Coldplay at the city’s Pavello Olimpic, he is offering Clash advice on where you begin – where you even begin to begin – when talking to a man whose band is older than you are.
“I always say start by asking about what I’ve been up to lately” he drawls. “But, you know, if I was interviewing David Gilmour of Pink Floyd I’m pretty sure my first question would be about ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, so I totally understand people want to talk about other stuff. Fire away with a question about ‘The Soft Bulletin’ or something if you like.”
Ah, yes, 1999’s ‘The Soft Bulletin’.
There had been signs of course. For seventeen years there had been signs of what could come. Debut album ‘Here It Is’ was an impressive, if essentially lightweight, collection of trippy stoner rock, while 1990’s ‘In A Priest Driven Ambulance’ – featuring future Mercury Rev front man Jonathan Donahue – was strong enough to convince Warner Brothers to give the band a $200,000 advance and a promise of creative freedom. The deranged psychosis of 1993’s ‘Transmissions From The Satellite Heart’, meanwhile, pushed the band into the public eye after lead single, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ became a minor radio hit.
Struggling to cope with the new-found fame, as well as Drodz’s new-found taste for heroin, the band retreated into themselves – “it was almost like we didn’t want to be liked,” said Wayne later.
And so it was left to their eighth studio album, 1997’s ultra-high concept ‘Zaireeka’, to really hint at the glories to come. Released on four separate CDs, each to be played on four different stereos at exactly the same time, it was essentially a record the average listener couldn’t actually listen to. Commercial suicide, in other words.
“We tend to become slaves to the thing we’re doing,” says Wayne. “We get lost in it, and we just hope that when we emerge we’ve created something cool.”
That Warner Bros. agreed to release it still amazes to this day. Yet, amid the experimentation, exploration and expense, something extraordinary emerged. For ‘Zaireeka’ was above all else, a record of great beauty that paved the way for what was to come two years later. “We approached the next album,” muses Wayne, “almost thinking it would probably be our last, and I think maybe that fatalistic attitude just gave us this super-human confidence to create what we did.”
“We tend to become slaves to the thing we’re doing.”
Released in 1999, ‘The Soft Bulletin’ was a masterpiece so grand in its vision, so bold with its orchestral ambition, so utterly overwhelming in its sheer emotional impact – here, a scientist races to save mankind, there a superman pleads for mercy because he is too weak to help the world – it was not just the greatest album of 1999, it was immediately recognised as one of the finest of the decade.
“It’s humbling for people to say that kind of thing, but yeah, I guess sometimes I have listened to it, and I think, ‘Fuck, this is pretty good.’ I’m very proud of it. The response was amazing. I’m not sure how we’d have coped with that if we’d been younger; we could have gone pretty wild.” Bracketed as part of a quartet of late Nineties albums said to define the era (see also Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’, Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’, and Mercury Rev’s ‘Deserter’s Songs’) it slapped The Flaming Lips in the middle of somewhere which, in all their years of adventures they’d never been, nor ever believed they would be: the critical zeitgeist.
Ten years, three albums, and a low-budget movie about a Christmas spent on Mars later, they’re still there. If Wayne Coyne never really expected to be in anything more than a cult band, he certainly never expected to become a respected cultural icon of his home town, Oklahoma City. He never thought a street – Flaming Lips Alley in the Bricktown part of the city – would be named after his outfit. He never thought one of his tracks – ‘Do You Realize’ from 2002’s ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ – would become the official state rock song. Strictly speaking he should have been right.
In a former frontier town renowned for hard men who talk hard, drink hard and fight hard, Coyne – an apparently sensitive soul who fills his live shows with cuddly creatures, confetti cannons and the odd Kylie Minogue cover while singing in brittle baritone about the transience of existence – is an odd icon, indeed. And yet he has become such a city institute he could recently be seen reading out the weather on local TV.
“I love Oklahoma,” he laughs. “I’ve pretty much lived in the same neighbourhood all my life and I’m very proud of that – there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather come home to. I think maybe they gave us the alley just because we live here and we’re still alive – like we’ve kind of done good without leaving. I’m sure some people think it’s pretty undignified to give any Oklahoman their own alley but I just thought it was really fucking cool. It makes me incredibly humble every time I go past it. When the mayor suggested it and asked how we’d feel about it, we all loved the idea.” Not that the honours have come without controversy.
The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize (Live on The David Letterman Show)
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In March of this year a small political storm was caused when Irvins wore a red t-shirt denoting a yellow hammer and sickle to the ceremony where ‘Do You Realize’ was announced as the state’s official rock song.
The track had won a public vote but fearing – obviously – the clothing symbolised communist infiltration, the Oklahoman House of Representatives refused to confirm the choice. One member Corey Holland said the t-shirt was “offensive” to Americans. Taking offence himself at the House’s failure to accept the result, Democrat Governor Brad Henry took the drastic measures of passing an executive order to confirm the song.
“They are proud ambassadors of their home state,” he declared.
“There was a whole lot of silliness,” sighs Wayne. “But I like the idea of our song being somehow official. We didn’t get involved in the politics and we don’t regret Michael wearing the t-shirt, we just didn’t really even think about it. It was a surprise when that all happened.” What shouldn’t have been a surprise was the song being picked in the first place. ‘Do You Realize’ is the dizzying soundtrack to the dizzying discovery that while human life is finite, human emotion is most certainly not.
“I’m approached more about that song than any other thing I’ve ever done,” says Wayne. “I think it’s maybe come to represent some powerful moments in people’s lives – I hear it’s played at weddings or christenings – and I find that amazing. The thing is I think somehow the lyrics are optimistic, very uplifting, and I suppose it’s hit a nerve.”
Certainly, it’s one of the band’s less abstract songs. More conventional Flaming Lip topics centre on such issues as religion, space, and the incomprehensibility of life.
“I never really think about what I’m writing,” explains Wayne. “We just do what we do almost on this masturbatory subconscious level – and you hope someone will explain it to you afterwards.”
Plenty of people will be lining up to explain what new album ‘Embryonic’ is about. Allow Clash to be at the front of the queue.
It’s about S & M, Wayne?
“There’s hints of that,” he admits. “But I think the submission and domination is more about trying to make sense of what evil is and what love is, it’s about self-exploration maybe.”
The double album started life as two separate spheres. One was to be full of stellar-produced soundscapes and orchestral sweeps; the other a nebulous freak out full of fizzing feedback.
“But as we got more and more lost in the music, the freak outs just took over,” says Wayne. “We never went back to the first sphere because we were having so much fun, it was just exciting to do.”
The results are exciting too.
The double album – incredibly the band’s first – has given The Flaming Lips a space to manoeuvre, which they’ve expertly exploited, exploring textures and tones that sound like they’ve been beamed back from the future.
It’s bizarre to talk of progression with a band on their twelfth album but progress is what’s achieved.
“It’s been a wonderful life,” Wayne told an interviewer recently. Maybe he was thinking of the time Justin Timberlake played bass for his band on Top Of The Pops while dressed as a dolphin; or perhaps he was reminiscing about every time he gets in his famous space ball and rolls out over the audience; or possibly he was remembering of the day he hosted a special car park gig where he conducted an orchestra of forty vehicles, each playing different tapes at different times.
Maybe he was musing on Michelle, his wife who he met nineteen years ago; or thinking about the stray dogs he takes into his redbrick home to look after and love; or considering the exhilaration of his annual march of a thousand flaming skeletons party in Oklahoma.
For Wayne Coyne, teenage drug dealer, fish flipper of eleven years, self-confessed freak, has surely had the most wonderful of lives. And still it goes on.
Today, in a sun-scorched Barcelona he says he hopes people like ‘Embryonic’, he wants to have kids soon, he thinks Oklahoma City is cooler than it’s given credit for.
Sometimes he still thinks about that armed robbery. Sometimes he doesn’t. But one thing, thirty years on, is absolutely certain.
When Wayne Coyne does die, it will be significant, and there will be music.
Words by Colin Drury