Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Marek Rygielski

“I don’t want to just leave rock music the way I found it,” the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne told Uncut magazine in 1999. “I want to have knocked it somewhere. And I want it to say, ‘Wayne was here; he did this. Good or bad, its course was altered.'”

He has altered the course. But what now? The question circles within my head as I walk into the concert hall.

The Lips come on strong vamping 2001: A Space Odyssey theme, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. As they do smoke machines hiss and confetti cannons explode. The air fills with paper shrapnel. It flickers slowly as it falls upon the crowd. Dozens of beach volleyball-sized balloons launch upward.

At the center of this psychedelic haze, Coyne delivers a brilliant rendition of ‘Race For The Prize’. Balloons batter him ceaselessly as he does yet he doesn’t bat an eye. A golden mass of inflatable letters reading “Fuck Yeah Brisbane” is produced. Coyne grabs them with both his hands and shakes them as though his life depends on it.

Then he hurls them outward. The crowd tears them apart, piece by piece. Loose letters join the confetti and balloons circling the air.

“With most artists, the longer they go on the less they have to offer,” Coyne mused in that same Uncut interview I mentioned earlier. “I want people to look at what I’m doing right now and see it as the best, the most important stuff I’ve ever done.”

He was younger then. And I know that people change. Still, I’ve taken the words to heart. And having done so it’s difficult to reconcile this sentiment with the current tour.

The Lips are playing songs from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Sure, there’s no harm in taking a victory lap. Not at all. The Soft Bulletin is an accomplished album. And yet, amongst all of the excitement, all the spectacle of the performance, I’m left wondering. Is resting so comfortably on cosy nostalgia and past triumph a good thing? Is this at all what this band is supposed to be about?

I’m not too sure. Tonight, it feels odd. It feels less like Wayne and the band is kicking the music that someplace else. At times it feels like they are simply pushing on.

“I want chaos and madness in my music,” Coyne once said. Dressed in all-white, like John Lennon on the cover of Abbey Road (or godfather of soul James Brown) Coyne looks resplendent as he attempts to invoke that chaos. Several times he implores the crowd to lose themselves, to scream at the top of their lungs. They cheer, they yell, the dance as they vent their euphoria in waves. But they do not scream.

The band’s set is crowd-pleasing. Musically they don’t miss a beat. There’s plenty of dazzling light projections, giant inflatable props and Coyne’s trademark boy-in-the-bubble moment. When the group gets down to jamming mid-set, the crowd is reminded that there is a serious musicality which is driving this machine.

The Lips have taken the idea of a concept album – Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – and translated that same sense of grand conceptual execution into a live show. This, as much as their records, is their legacy. And yes, it’s something which should be celebrated.

But right now, it rings hollow for me. I just don’t feel like it’s time to be resting upon those laurels. The Lips shouldn’t have to play along to the past. I want them here to deliver the best, the most important stuff they’ve ever done.

This may come across as selfish. But to me, the Flaming Lips are not only a band which seizes upon the grandiosity of rock’s spectacle but also the fiery attitude of punk. No doubt saddling anyone with even a spoonful of such expectation can end up weighing a ton.

Still, I’ll lay it on them. To me, the Lips greatest work has potential to be ahead of them. I need a band like this to make the kind of music which tells me as well as the rest of society that nothing is stable under the stars and sun. i need a band like this to change the mode of the music so that the walls of the city might shake.

Next time?