Hours before casually strolling out of an enormous vagina backdrop to march a giant plastic bubble onto his confetti-covered crowd, Wayne Coyne — frontman for Oklahoma's most famous musical export The Flaming Lips — sat with TheVine backstage at Harvest Festival Sydney and proved once again that an international rock star doesn’t have to be an elusive arse.
Coyne discussed Halloween, his band’s peculiar recent releases, the malleability of perception, and the durability of gummy confectionary. And then showed me a photo that scarred me for life.
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TheVine: How’s the festival been so far for you?
Wayne Coyne: Well, yesterday [in Melbourne] was great, and I can’t believe we’re already here! I mean, you just get done, and you get on a plane and you’re like, ‘Wow, we’re at another one!’ It seems like it’s a pretty cool festival, a lot of hip bands – there’s no, like, teenager bands. Aren’t there teenager bands in Australia?
Actually, this a totally pleasant change from the multitude of teenager bands… Have you seen any of the other Harvest acts play?
Well yesterday we managed to see a little bit of Mercury Rev, because of course we’ve known them forever.
Yeah – Jonathan Donahue used to be in Flaming Lips, right?
Yeah, for a couple of years. He was a great helper and a great songwriter and a great addition to our back-then crappy sound. He helped us a lot. So, we saw Mogwai, saw a little bit of Portishead – just the stuff towards the end of the day. I was doing a little bit of this [press] yesterday as well, so I get a little bit stuck and [looks at me, genuinely mortified, and gives my hand a squeeze] – Oh, I don’t mean stuck in a bad way!
[Changing the subject, Coyne gestures to my iPhone, which is recording the interview] I like these! These work so great, don’t they? Don’t you love iPhones? When I run into people who don’t have an iPhone I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ God I love these. They look so great.
The Flaming Lips - 'Do You Realise?' live at Glastonbury 2010
The Flaming Lips played a small Halloween party at a fan’s house in West Virginia a few weeks ago.
We did! A little while back – probably about a year ago – we thought, 'Wouldn’t it be fun if, every tour that we could, we played a house party?' Where, you know, you just go to someone’s house and you set up and play a couple of songs, and they have a crazy party, and people do drugs and wreck shit. But we didn’t want to do it for, like, a fraternity or anything. I mean, you can’t always tell what people are going to be like. These are just people I talk to on Twitter. But this gal was the perfect candidate.
She was 17, she was in high school, we weren’t playing anywhere around her house – we hadn’t really played anywhere around there in a long time. So she had all of her friends from high school come, and a lot of people whose house it was – they had a lot of cool friends. But a lot of rednecks too [laughs]. A lot of people who didn’t know who we were.
Did you have to arrange it all with her parents?
Well you don’t in the beginning. In the beginning, you think you’re just gonna show up, and then little by little the parents get involved when they think, ‘Uh, there’s gonna be a couple hundred drunk people at my house?’ But all of that’s kind of fun too. It seemed alright, it wasn’t out of control. The cops showed up, but the cops were very nice.
Did she have a good time?
I think she was a little… [pause] I think she was glad it was over, you know? It’s a lot of attention if you’re not used to getting attention – it’s all about you, you, you, you. I think it ended up fun, but if you’re not used to that, it kind of wears on you, I guess.
The Flaming Lips - live at Halloween house party 2011
I wanted to ask about the recent stuff the Lips have been doing. The 6-hour long song and the 24-hour long song. What’s the feedback been like?
Well, we started to stream it on Halloween – I don’t know if you guys celebrate Halloween down here, but it’s a big deal in America now. The biggest deal ever. [Laughs somewhat manically; Coyne has proven himself countless times to be a huge Halloween fan] You didn’t have to buy the song to be able to hear it, and that’s a great thing for me because I’m always aware of our fans, you know? It’s hard to get the [physical copies], because we don’t make very many of them. I want to include everybody; I don’t like it just being about collectors. But it is what it is.
Not that it’s a bad thing. But you know sometimes when you have to pick music, you have to go through your big list and be like, “WHAT DO I WANT TO HEAR”? Well this is easier, it just plays, and it’s kind of a surprise where it’s gonna send you off. But it’s not for everybody. The 24-hour song is a strange odyssey, there’s a lot of it. There’s this one section of the music that’s a repeated series of chords that have different dynamics of erupting and dying and going back and forth, and it goes for seven hours. When we’re talking about something that goes for 24 hours, you know, it’s just a whole other standard of perception.
It’s sort of like – well, we fly a lot, and I don’t really like to fly, but we flew down here [to Australia]. And when you know that you’re going to be sitting on this airplane for 15 hours, sometimes three, four hours goes by really quickly; you don’t think about it. And then today we had a flight that was not even two hours, and the whole time you’re just like [starts banging desk impatiently]. It feels like it takes forever. And this is like the idea of perception – your perception is a very elastic thing. I’ll have people that will have listened to three hours of the 24-hour song. They’ll say, ‘I only got to listen to three hours of your song!’ – but if you think about it, that’s an incredible amount of time for anybody to sit there and just listen to your group. You know, that’s sometimes three or four records in a row, if you’re going to think about normal records.
And I like that. I think that’s a great thing about Flaming Lips fans, that it’s not just about sound, you know? It’s about an experience, it’s about changing what you think about this. So I love it when people play along, and are able to be sort of absorbed into my world, and listen to it my way.
The Flaming Lips - 'Sweet Bird of Youth' 24 Hour Song sample from 7 Skies H3
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