ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
WAYNE Coyne is sitting in his Toyota Prius with the air conditioning up full. He isn’t short of room at his Oklahoma City compound – more religious cult HQ than rock-star residence – but, as he explains, it’s easier to talk here than in the house.
“We have six dogs now,” he says. “We have peacocks, cats, a bunny, and some mice that we’re trying to get rid of. We have a big place, four big houses on a compound. But the car’s like my little office.”
The houses have long since been converted into The Flaming Lips’ nerve centre and Coyne’s space-age home. Most important among them, he says, is Pink Floor studio – so named for its French rubber tiles that replicate the look and feel of bubblegum. Coyne might now regret the choice of flooring material, but the studio is still the perfect place in which he can indulge his constant urge to create.
“The only reason I do other things, like working on the roof or trimming the trees or whatever, is that it makes my music and art better,” he says. “But, as musicians and as artists and just as weirdos doing what we do, we have the greatest fucking lives ever.”
It’s hard to imagine that Coyne has time for domestic chores these days. Since 2009’s double album Embryonic, the Lips have been working at a
remarkable pace. Alongside their own albums The Terror and Oczy Mlody have come collaborations with Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus, complete re-recordings of Beatles and Pink Floyd records, a 24-hour song, and music released inside gummy skulls or on 12”s filled with the band’s blood. If The Flaming Lips had set out to alienate the audience they’d amassed during their commercial peak – The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and At War With The Mystics – one suspects they couldn’t have done it better.
“I totally understand how people could be confused, or just give up, really!” says Coyne. “But you make what you make, and you can’t say, ‘Well, we can’t put that– it was a tangent, it was something else calling us. We submit to the urge and hope it works.”
