A sorta new, mostly improved flaming lips

By Stephen Smysnuik

Wayne Coyne doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. But if all goes to plan, his band, the Flaming Lips, will finally play in Vancouver.

The group has performed here many times over the years, though there’s been a significant three-year gap between when these tickets went on sale and when, finally—mercifully!--the show will happen at the Commodore Ballroom (plus an added second night, for good measure). That gap, of course, was the result first of worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns, then, later, the result of Coyne getting COVID. But now, here we are. Hopefully.

“That’s really one of the ridiculous things that if you would’ve told me that people are going to buy these tickets, and they’re going to come to the show it’s going to be three years later, I’d be, ‘No way. There’s just no way anybody’s going to do that,’ ” Coyne tells the Straight in an interview.

That’s cute Wayne, but we beg to differ. If there was ever a time for the Flaming Lips’ exuberant, joyful, and theatrical live show, it would be right about now, when the world’s political system seems on the verge of collapse over spy balloons—never mind, uh, everything else that’s happening. The Lips’ live experience has always been a communion between band and audience, a space for crowds to revel in the bliss of togetherness, filling our batteries with hope and joy to carry us on our way.

In other words, it’s always a great time, and possibly even better now. Because, as Coyne notes, “Our concerts are more insane than ever.”

That’s saying a lot for a band that’s renowned for costumed craziness, laser beams and inflatable unicorns. Consider its COVID shows in the Lips’ hometown of Oklahoma, in which the group performed in its own “Space Bubbles,” with the crowd members also in their own individual inflatables. The clever concept—which inverted a long-standing Flaming Lips trope, where Coyne would crowd surf in a bubble at the beginning of each show—actually belied a new and improved approach to performing. No longer in a rush to get from gig to gig, the band could perfect its sound design, set design, and all the other elements, to ensure each aspect of the show was the best it could be.

“I think previous to the pandemic, I mean, we really would just be running to catch up all the time. There was just never a moment to do anything,” Coyne says. “Doing [those bubble shows], we really figured out how to do our songs better, how we would run the monitor systems better, how our guy at the front of house could do better, how we could make our singing better.”

But COVID wasn’t all technical and creative breakthroughs for the band. The Lips lost two members following those space bubble shows—keyboardist Jake Ingalls, who went to focus on his work with Spaceface, and bassist Michael Ivins, who’d been with the band since its inception in 1983. The departure leaves Coyne as the only original member on the roster, but also gives him and Steve Drozd, the Lips’ multi-instrumentalist and Coyne’s chief co-writer, more flexibility to explore new terrain in their songwriting.

The band had already forged a new path with its last effort, 2020’s American Head, released in the middle of COVID lockdowns. That album is a somber and sobering reflection of the Flaming Lips’ roots in the American Midwest, abandoning the whimsical experimentalism for more pastoral psychedelia. As a few critics pointed out in their reviews, it marked a fresh direction for a band that’s made a career of changing directions. For Coyne, breaking new creative ground is almost a compulsion.

“Maybe it’s dopamine, whatever that rush is that you get when you’re discovering something new that you didn’t expect to find and you really, really like it. Once you get that through making music and stumbling upon things, it’s addicting. That’s what drives you, that’s what you want,” he says.

“The way that I make music is just so primitive that it could literally be the same song over and over, because I don’t really know how any of it works. Luckily, a lot of producers and musicians have come my way and we get to do this insane music.”

So keep this in mind for the upcoming gigs at the Commodore. It will be the culmination of two years of perfecting the Lips’ live show and breaking new ground. Coyne says. With the exception of the “hits” everyone hopes to see—“Do You Realize??” and “Race for the Prize” and a few others—each show will have a “radically different setlist.” He teases there might even be a few new songs, if “they are working and sounding right.” Supposing, of course, that the band actually ends up playing.

“Let’s not jinx it,” Coyne says. We’re knocking on wood. GS