Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips dress up the night in giant balloons and glitter

Voodoo 2009

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By Kayla Falgoust

He's artistically and musically talented. He's got great style and killer hair. He travels via space bubble, and you can call him a punk rocker on acid if you'd like. Or you can call him just plain weird. He won't mind. In fact, he'd embrace it.

Try as you might, you'll find no cooler persona in all of rock music than Wayne Coyne, ringleader of the Flaming Lips extravaganza extraordinaire.

At age 48, Coyne has been doing this gig for a while - since 1983 to be exact. (He kindly reminded me that this is five years before I was even born.) But age is no reason to despair for the Flaming Lips. Age is nothing but a number - just ask the masses of college students who arrive at their shows super earlier to get picked to dance on stage alongside the band.

But according to Coyne, the band's continued success after all these years - even with the younger generation - is just "dumb luck."

"I sometimes think it's that maybe the music we're making feels like it's made in the spirit of the ideas that are going around today or that we're always kind of curious about the current state of music," said Coyne. "We play stuff like the Pitchfork Festival and All Tomorrow's Parties, and I realize when we're there, sometimes we're like the oldest guys there...Sometimes I forget that 'Oh yeah, most of the groups here are like 20 year olds or something.'"

"I think it must just be inherited somewhere in the way that people view us as being sort of still creating as opposed to having already created our sound and then just living off of that," he added. "I'd say there's big groups even like U2 - not that we sound anything like them or like them at all - I still think there's an element of just being curious about the music that you can make today."

So why do a bunch of "old" guys playing psychedelic rock still appeal to a younger, hipper generation? It's mainly because this bunch of old guys is just as hip if not hipper.

To the ordinary college music fan, it is no mystery why young people choose to listen to the Flaming Lips. With critical and popular successes with 1999's The Soft Bulletin, 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and 2006's At War with the Mystics, it's easy to jump on the Flaming Lips bandwagon. These guys just know how to make music sound interesting.

"I think it's because there are some intrinsic sounds that humans just like, and I wouldn't think that our music necessarily sounds old, but I think it sounds like something that is in your subconscious," said Coyne. "And maybe that's why musicians and artists are drawn to that sound - because it feels as though it's a sound that's not in the world but it's in your mind."

"When I listen to records, I don't always think of them as being old or new or whatever," he added. "But there is definitely some quality to this warm, distorted freakiness that we insert into our music really all the time."

The Flaming Lips recently released their twelfth studio album, a double disc entitled Embryonic. According to Coyne (if I interpreted him correctly), this album is a conscious movement into the unknown, the weird, the fascinating, and the bizarre and a small movement away from the more mainstream pop sounds of their last two albums.

"I think with our new record [Embroyic] we were trying to stay balanced as much as we could in that strange nether zone between living in our subconscious and living in the real awareness of our mind, part of our creative mind," said Coyne. "I don't know if it's good or bad, but I think when you make music you kind of just indulge yourself for better or for worse. You try to do just whatever you like."

Going in a new direction might be a risky move for the Flaming Lips, especially for the younger fans who are used to the music released in the last ten or so years. However, Coyne seems rather optimistic about the outcome of things.

"I think a lot of times artists feel like they're restricted, and they feel like 'Damn, if I could only do what I want...' Well I think the Flaming Lips, for better or for worse, I think we stand as a group that says 'You know, we want to do just whatever the fuck we want.' We're not really asking people if they think this is cool or is it going to sell a lot of records. But I think most of our success is just really dumb luck because we are not really trying to be commercially successful," said Coyne.

"We don't want the whole world to be brought to you by Walt Disney or Wal-mart or Target," he added. "We want some piece of the world to be a different sort of experience."

In addition to fronting the Flaming Lips, Coyne has also created the cover art for the band's albums, including their most recent release. In matters of art, Coyne has much to say about personal expression and finding a great idea, offering some advice for the artists and graphic designers out there.

"People just want to believe that you can just magically think of some idea and go out and find it, but it's not like that," Coyne said. "A lot of times, you just struggle endlessly and something just appears."

"People will act like there are good ideas and bad ideas, but that is just a complete lie," he added. "I mean, it's all invisible, and you have to somehow trust your kind of intuitive belief in something."

The Flaming Lips are returning to New Orleans to perform at this year's Voodoo Fest. The last time they were in town was for Voodoo in 2006, one year after Hurricane Katrina.

"I think there are so many great elements of New Orleans and a lot of those were not damaged by Katrina anyway," said Coyne. "I never looked at New Orleans as like a Disneyland; it really is a real city."

"I think everyone is involved in their own personal plight," he added. "I think [New Orleans] certainly has survived Katrina, and I think little by little that will become something that happened in the past so that we'll all start dealing with what New Orleans is like now."

With that, the Flaming Lips' Voodoo performance is one not to be missed. The band is well known for its elaborate stage shows, complete with large balloons and tons of confetti and glitter. Although Coyne says there will be no Teletubbies at this year's Voodoo Fest, he did mention something about dancing yetis and the infamous space bubble.

"There will be female super yetis on one side [of the stage] and giant male yetis on the other," said Coyne.

"I'm hoping we'll always do the space bubble, especially at giant festivals like this where you need a couple of spectacles every couple of hours," he added.

According to Coyne, most of the show will be the usual stuff from the older albums, but the band will also be trying out some of the new songs from Embryonic.

"I would say that 70 percent of [the show] is stuff from our past with different, new pieces of glitter attached to it," said Coyne. "And then I'd say 30 percent of it is brand new, freaky stuff that I don't know if the audience will understand it or like it or get it. I imagine they will, but you never know."

Check out The Flaming Lips at Voodoo Fest in New Orleans on Sunday, Nov. 1 at 5:45 p.m. on the PlayStation/Billboard.com Stage in Le Ritual. Get there early and vie for a spot to dress up and dance on stage with the band.

Originally Published: Issue 821 - October 28, 2009

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