Oklahoma oddballs The Flaming Lips are back with a new album of outrageously original experimental music. Head Lipman Wayne Coyne tells Jim Carroll that he's still astounded by the group's success - and that perfection is something not worth striving for
THIS is how things go in Wayne's world. Every night when he and his band are on tour, Wayne is zipped into a large, plastic, Italian-made bubble. While various people wearing panda, pig, frog, leopard, dog and rabbit costumes jump up and down onstage, Wayne rolls in his bubble into the audience.
"You're in there and it's hot. You can't hear or see very well, its like walking on hot coals, you just have to look up, keep going and hope it all works. I try to avoid clusters of small 14-year-old girls in case I might crush them while they're doing their make-up. I tend to walk over guys instead. I aim for the guys.
"Hey, it's an experience, you know. They can go to work the following day and say 'I had this old man in a space bubble walking over my head last night'. How many times do you get to say that? If you want something weird, I'm your guy."
Wayne Coyne sits back in his chair and beams. In a spiffing suit, he resembles a gentleman farmer in town for the day to do some business.
Coyne's business is The Flaming Lips, and one of rock's most charming interviewees is in a London hotel suite to talk about At War with the Mystics, the 11th album from the band. Thanks to their last two (The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots), the Flaming Lips are synonymous with a certain kind of widescreen, melodic wig-out. Alternative music's favourite psychedelic daydreamers, the Lips suddenly had the songs to back up their outlandish live show and thus became the ultimate festival band.
It was not a podium which anyone expected to see the furry freaks from Oklahoma City occupying back when they were releasing records like Zaireeka, a quadruple album whose four CDs were designed to be played simultaneously. But their new stature suited the band, and Coyne in particular attained something akin to guru status amongst alt.rock's young guns.
On Mystics, however, the experimental edge which dominated earlier albums returns. A metaphysical clatter of sounds and styles, Mystics is powerful, fresh and free, a collection of songs which don't really have anything other than a mystical umbrella to hold them all together. Yet, strangely and gloriously, it somehow works.
Coyne says that Mystics is the answer to a lot of questions. "We were asking ourselves, did we want to do a funky, prog-rock record. Could we do that kind of Herbie Hancock meets Black Sabbath vibe? Could we do something with all these jazzy chords which were about the place?"
It was not about producing a perfect artefact. "I don't think we're capable of being flawless because we probably equate perfection with boredom," smiles Coyne. "We'll always be a little smelly or messy or clumsy, and probably reveal something about how the human condition works in that way."
The Lips' success since 1999 is a never-ending source of astonishment for Coyne. "When we made The Soft Bulletin, we didn't think anyone would like it, that it would be our art-rock record. We really thought it would be the last record we ever made and we decided to go out with a bang. We reached for the stars. We were probably more ambitious than we thought we could be. It came out and people didn't just like it, they loved it. It was like being saved from dying."
There was certainly no big plan. "All those things we did on the last two albums, we arrived at them by accident. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, You never know what's going to fail and what's going to succeed. You really have to make a record where you're totally honest to yourself. It's better to do that than follow the White Stripes or Strokes or Bon Jovi or whoever. At least you're failing on your own terms."
Remarkably, in an era when major labels have become clearinghouses for disposable pop, the Lips have enjoyed the patronage of Warner Bros since 1991.
"We never demanded millions of dollars and lots of attention" is Coyne's explanation for their long stay at the label. "They're the ones who decide what gets spent. They sell millions of records by Madonna and Green Day and if they decide to put that machine behind a Flaming Lips records, that's great. It doesn't infringe in any way on the authenticity or experience of the music and what we're about. But we would survive with or without their attention."
Coyne sees Mystics as a joust between good and evil, the "good" being the crazy world of the Lips and the "evil" being, well, who else in these early days of the 21st century? "The nature of art is that you want to get out this stupid, obsessive, internal, existential fear you have inside you. That's the difference between artists and non-artists. We all have this stuff inside of us, but most of us are happy to leave it at that. But artists can't do that. It must come out!
"So if you're lucky, you'll get a meeting between all this stuff coming out and the real world outside your bubble. It's like two grizzly bears fighting. With this record, you get this fantastical Disney-esque war of the wizards atmosphere meeting all these very real things like George Bush, the war in Iraq and Cindy Sheehan and they wrestle."
But Coyne knows there can be inherent dangers in simplifying a big political picture. "I didn't want to make George Bush look like a fantastical, colourful monster, so I hope that those contrasts between the beautiful Flaming Lips world and the horrible, corrupt, ugly outside world come across.
"That's why the songs about corruption and suicide bombers and Bush kept pointing back in at ourselves. We never said 'hey, look at these people, they suck'. We kept bringing it back in and asking what we are about and what we would do if we had that much power."
Some of the tracks here, such as Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, would have been at home on Yoshimi or Bulletin. But there's also much to send recent converts running for the hills. Coyne is non-plussed by such a scenario.
"Sometimes the failures in art are as spectacular as the stuff which works because you can really see inside people and how they react to the failures. When people mess up, you really see what they're all about. We don't learn about people when it all goes right. But when someone like Evel Knievel crashes, or those Chinese ice-skaters fall over, we see something unexpected about them."
He's also sanguine about the possibility that Mystics might not do as well as the previous albums. It's not that he doesn't care - more that he's happy with his lot.
"If I was 25 instead of 45, I might have got addicted to that success and done things differently. Success is wonderful, but it changes you and it's destructive. It's like crack cocaine, it's hard to deal with.
"Nowadays, though, there are things I have in my life which are not going to be changed by the success or otherwise of the band. I have my house, my wife, my dog and my family, and that stuff is always going to be there. I would never be one of these guys who needs to have a threesome every night. Me and my wife, I'm fine with that. I don't have a raging ego which needs to be satisfied by getting more, more, more."
But what continues to fire him up is the art itself. "I know what I truly love and that's making music and making a connection with people, whether it's a few dozen or 100,000. If I make something that I've poured every fibre of my being into and that I believe in, there are people who will respond to that and that's something which will never change."
That said, Coyne also enjoys the fringe benefits that come with selling a couple of million copies of an album about pink robots. "I really appreciate all the situations I end up in up. The other stuff, whether it's sitting next to Madonna at the Brits or whatever, is the absurd stuff which comes along with making art, and I'd be the first one to get in line and say 'lets do that'.
"Anyone who doesn't think that that stuff can be fun as well are lying to themselves. They're naysaying another fantastical element of being alive."
At War with the Mystics is released next Friday
