The Flaming Lips interviews

Interviews: 2016 / 2009 (below)

Wayne Coyne is about to reveal the meaning of life. He’s sitting in his living room in Oklahoma City, in a compound resembling Edinburgh Castle, staring at a giant inflatable sun and reclining on an oversized couch made of white fur. The dog he’s petting thinks the couch is its mother.

Coyne is possibly the only person that would seem perfectly at place in a scene like this. When not trying to scare local children or dying his pets pink, the singer has been concocting the kind of offbeat ideas that have propelled the Flaming Lips’ career for the last 26 years.

There was the quadruple-disc set designed to be played on four stereos simultaneously; the ‘parking lot orchestra’ that synchronised 40 car stereos; the live concert listened to on headphones; the sci-fi movie about a suicidal Santa, filmed in Coyne’s backyard over five years; the guitars with built-in Theremins and iPods; a marching band with vagina-shaped heads; the concept album about a Japanese girl who battles evil pink robots; a Halloween procession of a thousand flaming skeletons; and most recently, the assembly of 400 naked cyclists for a video shoot.

“To me it’s not just about the idea but becoming obsessed with the idea,” says Coyne. “I’m not proud of that but I know it’s what gives me the confidence and energy to say: ‘I’m just gonna do this thing’. You become sort of comfortable writing songs a certain way or singing about things in a certain tone of emotion...and a lot of that will tend to sound alike. But for me, I never really thought we had a style. The thing that we do is to be these weirdoes that keep on exploring and finding new dimensions of ourselves. That doesn’t mean they’re bigger or better or more entertaining than the last dimension...but we keep trying.”

The determination to be different began when, as the youngest of five brothers who all painted, Coyne gradually found art to be “a little boring and isolated”. It was only after attending a concert by The Who and a late-night, smoke-filled screening of Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii that he realised that the theatrics of rock could offer a full range of expression.

“I thought I might be one of these exotic drug dealers or something. Nothing serious. There was always a sense that I wanted to be an artist, but there was no other real profession awaiting me out there. So from the time I was 16 or 17, I was already thinking that, y’know, I had a guitar and I wanted to be in a rock group. That was 1977 – the whole world seemed like it was about music.”

Dropping out of high school in his senior year, Coyne spent much of the next decade working as a costumed fry cook at Long John Silver’s, a local fast food outlet. But one day the shock of being held up at gunpoint acted as a catalyst for his creativity. A spate of armed robberies in the area had left several restaurant employees dead, and now Coyne found himself face-down on the floor, thinking: ‘Is this it?’

The Flaming Lips, a band Coyne formed with his brother and bassist Michael Ivins, took on a new urgency. But although the group spent years adapting the line-up, putting out albums on a small indie label and touring the college circuit on a budget, it never grew above the level of dedicated hobbyists.

They were content with their modest achievements, feeling lucky to make $100 a week in the knowledge that they were just doing it because they liked it. As Coyne puts it, “We never really considered that we should be that successful, so I think our standards were probably lower than everybody else’s.”

It wasn’t until 1990, with the release of In a Priest Driven Ambulance, that the Lips outgrew their image as garage-punk misfits . Their prank calls to Warner Bros. looking to speak to Jane’s Addiction paid off when a label rep decided to attend one of their shows. That they set the stage on fire, nearly killing themselves and the 300 people watching, seemed to seal the deal.

Yet even with the backing of a major label, by the time the band scored a novelty pop hit with ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ in 1993, numerous Flaming Lips musicians had been and gone (including Jonathan Donahue, who left to focus on his own band, Mercury Rev). Moving forward, the collaborative, multi-instrumental approach of the group’s only constants, Coyne and Ivins, allowed drummer Steven Drozd  to pursue other styles of instrumentation, shifting the band’s sound towards progressive pop. But by the time their groundbreaking album The Soft Bulletin ushered in a new era of critical fanfare, their good fortune seemed to be coming to an end.

“Steven started to become a heroin addict in 1994,” Coyne explains. “So up until 2002, he was pretty much escalating towards death. By the time I wrote ‘The Spiderbite Song’, Michael had this accident where a wheel from another car had somehow come off and slammed into his driver’s door, trapping him. It almost came through and hit him in the head. There were definitely enough things in a short amount of time where you start thinking: ‘Yeah, this has all worked out so far but maybe this is the end of it’.”

For a brief moment, Coyne slows down – but only to cough out a succession of wheezy laughs between sentences. “So on one level it was kind of devastating but on another level it showed me that it was really up to me. Until then I sort of felt like it belonged to the cosmos, that it was up to serendipity to work. But after that I realised it wasn’t at all. The Soft Bulletin, Zaireeka, Christmas On Mars – it all came from that epiphany.”

It also helped develop the band’s live show into an interactive multi-media experience. Hand puppets, fake blood, confetti, balloons, giant fists, megaphone cheerleading, dancers in animal costumes and, of course, Coyne crowd-surfing in a giant space-bubble all came to symbolise the Lips’ fusion of anarchy and inspiration.

A Grammy Award for 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots followed by an opportunity to step into the White Stripes’ summer festival slots rocketed the band from art-rock outsiders to the most adored live act around. But criticisms have lingered, even among diehard fans, that the group’s showmanship is merely a gimmick that leaves the music secondary to the spectacle.

“I think the spectacle would not be known if it didn’t have music with it. Even as someone as phenomenal as Jimi Hendrix, the footage he’s most known for is when he lights his guitar on fire. And it’s a wonderful creation. I mean music is such a strange, abstract cloud. You don’t really know what it is. The human mind needs an image to [associate] this sound to it. I think that’s why people remember anything about groups at all. People say: ‘Oh, isn’t he that guy who walks in the space bubble?’

“And to me that would be wonderful. It’s like Santa Claus or something. You have to be an exaggerated character and in a sense I think that music lets you have that. I’m kind of a bad singer, so while I sing these songs you can see a 50ft naked woman dancing behind me and I’ll pour blood on my head and it’ll be great! I know music is for the most part something that you enjoy almost in isolation, but a rock concert is a big freak out.”

Coyne is perfectly suited to the role of ringleader.  With his streaks of silver curls and three-piece suits, he effuses charm, bubbling over with a seemingly infinite stock of ideas and anecdotes. He also takes an interest in others with the kind of conviction a politician would kill for.

Although Coyne seems acutely aware of his magnetism – something others believe he uses as a skilful means of distraction and control – he’s adamant that his benevolent ego has always been a part of who he is. “I never felt like a nerd or an outsider. But I think people liked me enough. I was definitely one of the cool kids. I mean I was one of the only people in high school you could buy pot from!”

To his fans, Coyne has become a Pied Piper-like figure who inspires them to follow the Lips’ live circus with cult-like devotion.  “I don’t know how they do it,” Coyne says of the band’s tour chasers.  “They’re not independently wealthy but they’re free enough to sort of follow you around endlessly. There are some fans that we’ve known for 10 years now, people that you see grow up, like: ‘Wow, you’re still doing this’.

“I don’t think of that necessarily as a bad thing. They’re doing what they like and they feel some sort of connection to what we do. There are obviously some who are only in it to get attention, [but] they’ll leave after a while 'cause it’s not worth it. The ones that truly do admire you and love you and all that – you know, it’s great to be loved.”

Honesty is not an issue with Coyne. His throwaway comments on everything from Arcade Fire to Bob Dylan have sparked uproar in the past. But even Warner Bros. couldn’t have expected him to announce details of the band’s latest and final release for the label, Embryonic, with an admission that all the usual pitfalls of a double-album are especially true in this case.

Yes, it could have been better as a single disc and sure, the band completely lost their way, but it is what it is: an improvised set of brooding, free-form jams. Yet as Coyne explains, these moments of doubt have always been there. Nobody gets better and better for 26 years and the disjointed Can-like krautrock of Embryonic is more an avoidance of a mid-life crisis than the result of one.

“I never considered that we wouldn’t find a way but that doesn’t mean that you find a way that’s great or interesting... I can say that about some of our most popular and successful songs, even a song like ‘Do You Realize?’ I mean there are moments when you’re making it and you’re like: ‘This just seems like a bunch of hokey shit’. Then someone listens to it and they think it’s so simple and perfect. You feel good for five minutes and then you fall directly back into: ‘We suck. Why do we even do this?’

“I think that’s just the nature of working on your own ideas. Unless you’re completely conceited and full of yourself, you always worry about if it’s any good. You just have to hope there’s some unique charm about what you do that gets you through the door and frankly a lot of times you don’t know what that is. Sometimes I just think it’s timing. You can’t really ever control that.”

In the case of the gig that got them signed, Coyne explains,  the band had assumed it was because of the phenomenal “psychedelic-punk-rock freak-out of a night” they produced. Only later was it revealed that Coyne’s teeth had been the nuance that won the label rep over. “And when she said that, it actually came as a great relief,” he says. “I thought: ‘I don’t know if I’ll always write songs and set the stage on fire but at least I’ll always have my dumb smile and my teeth.’”

Coyne is relentlessly positive. He excites easily and has a way of making everything sound simple – or as he describes it, coming out with “cosmic hippy shit”. No wonder then, that when Pitchfork gave their summer festival-goers an opportunity to ask the frontman a question, fans were either frothing at the mouth or lost for words. So as Coyne’s manager insists that there’s only enough time for one final question, the obvious subject to broach with any Pied Piper worth following is of course, the meaning of life. He chuckles heartily but again remains unflappable, barely pausing to consider his answer.

“I suppose it’s to make sense of the life that you have. I don’t know if that means that life has any real meaning. To be creative and imaginative aren’t just things that artists should have. Every human in existence creates the meaning that they want in their life. I say it all the time but, y’know, two people could be walking along the beach and one person notices how great the water smells and how beautiful the sunrise or sunset is.

“The clouds are making a painting of a poodle or whatever. And the other person is just on their cell-phone saying how miserable life is. Both are having the exact same experience, but they’re valuing different things. So I would say the bad news is: it’s up to you. But the good news is: up to you. Whatever you want it to mean, it can mean that.”