And its not because its bad, its not because anybody else should do what I’ve done. It was almost like in a day, I’m done with that. I think I reached a point where its like, I’ve watched enough TV, I’ve listened to enough NPR. I don’t think it would be good if I hadn’t already had a lot of… there’s days where all you would do is listen to NPR, watch news. Is that a good thing, you think, kind of delving more into your subconscious and your own personality? And I wouldn’t even be able to tell you if Obama got killed this morning, I really don’t know. I think we kind of live in our own world now. We’re pretty disconnected from daily events. It’s just, “We are what we are, hope you like it.” We perform and we do our thing, but I never thought of it like that. But for us, there’s absolutely no contrivance. So for me, that’s always like, “Whoa, wait a minute, I’m just talking with you.” And he’s so smart, we all get the joke. And then suddenly he goes into character, and he’s confrontational about things that three seconds earlier, he wasn’t. He’s gracious, and he’s smart, and its all coming at you, and its in one dimension. One second you’re talking to him, and he’s really Stephen Colbert. And that’s part of the dilemma when you’re with him. Part of Stephen’s thing is that it’s all a contrivance.
Well, I don’t think about it like that so much. Do you feel similarities between your band’s aesthetic and the kind that show goes for? I know that some of the people on staff are always saying, any chance they get, “We’ve got to get the Flaming Lips here.” And we have new stuff out, so it worked out.īoth The Colbert Report and your band have this incredible theatricality, outlandishness, and a kind of charismatic talking head figure at the helm. And it’s just a great show, he’s so smart. Well… it’s good enough (laughs)! It’s fun to be invited to show, knowing how much he loves music. This is one is probably bigger and better than anyone you’ve ever seen, right? Speaking of great shows, you’ve obviously played some of the biggest festivals in the world.
Wow, wow! It was a great show, and I didn’t know about all that. I saw people, myself included, just scrambling to get cabs anywhere they could to make it to the show. Someone jumped in front of the train going up to the venue and died, so people could barely make it up there. That audience seemed especially grateful since there was a lot of drama. You’d start off just saying, “we’re playing this music, and its all in order and all that sort of stuff.” But when you play for crowds that know every second of that music, and have had a connection with that, you can feel it.
That was the thing that would happen with some of those. The last time I saw The Flaming Lips was in London last summer, when the band performed The Soft Bulletin. During the taping of the event last Friday, the Voice sat down with Coyne to talk about the band’s upcoming 30th anniversary, human skulls filled with blood and new music, and an accidental game of telephone that might just have turned into a LSD-filled night. Intrepid as the headliner of StePhest Colbchella ‘012 Rocktaugustfest, an over-the-top take on the music festival. Coyne and the Flaming Lips appear tonight on The Colbert Report, getting interviewed in a decommissioned space shuttle and performing aboard The U.S.S. Coyne has made a scholarly pursuit out of an obsession with examining trivialities-the little things-in the most grandiose way possible.īut he may have met his match in comedian and faux pundit Stephen Colbert. It comes off almost like a brain-fried hippie having a conversation with a sped-up incarnation of the Dali Lama, but the trains of thought converge into a force of charisma and authority. The band’s most recent work, Heady Fwends, was made with people who spanned the gamut of popular music-Yoko Ono, Prefuse 73, Ke$ha.įew personalities are more outsized than Coyne’s when he talks, he uses what seem to be the most directly vague terms imaginable. The band has consistently grown creatively, too, its music morphing from scuzzy buzz-bin warmth to orchestral pop masterpieces to hard-edged, highly adventurous psych rock explorations. The Lips have an impressive track record of following through on their shenanigans, and that devotion to being endlessly irreverent and self-indulgent (in the most nurturing way) has helped them build a cult-like army of followers. What often starts off as a whimsical vision might just end up as a new world record (for the most live concerts in 24 hours) or a limited-edition vinyl release infused with the blood of other artists (as was the case for 2011’s The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends). Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne dreams weird and hard and big.