WHEN Wayne Coyne answers our FaceTime call, he’s just leaving his local hardware store. Presumably he’s a valued customer – down the years, Coyne has personally constructed many of The Flaming Lips’ fantasy environments, from the 10-foot-tall chrome head installation that inspired King’s Mouth to the makeshift film sets around Oklahoma City where he filmed Christmas On Mars. “We don’t have a production company,” Coyne grins, still self-sufficient after all these years. “It’s just us weirdos, you know?” At 61, his creative spark remains undimmed. Having just painted a whole new series of covers for the upcoming deluxe reissue of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots – Uncut’s Album Of The Year in 2002 – he reveals that he’s also halfway through creating a 300-page graphic novel telling the story of the album. The Lips have been touring hard all summer and the follow-up to 2020’s American Head is also beginning to occupy his thoughts. On top of it all, Coyne is now the father of two boys, Bloom (aged three) and Rex (six months). “I’m the luckiest dude who’s ever been alive, it’s just amazing,” he says. In fact, the whole family are about to drive to a festival that the Lips are headlining in Arkansas. “We take them everywhere as much as we can, that’s just our life.”
Coyne didn’t have any hesitations about introducing his children to the Lips’ travelling circus. “It’s not a bad thing to be around,” he insists. “I see cool people that are laughing and having a great time and using their enthusiasm and their energy. We have a great crew and everybody in the group is fun. You know, [playing live] shouldn’t have to be some serious, stressful thing where you have to take so many drugs to get through it. It’s fucking music, it’s amazing!”
And in a way, The Flaming Lips’ stage show, with its giant bubbles and inflatable unicorns, has become something of a psychedelic soft-play itself, a multi-hued 21stcentury quasi-concept classic. It contains hummable anthems, universal sentiments and vaudeville songwriting tricks, but also makes room for trip-hop instrumentals and a Japanese experimental musician screaming. Twenty years on, it feels like the moment the Lips became part of the cultural firmament, allowing them to go on and do pretty much anything and everything they wanted.
