​Flame on: Q&A with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips

The band that battled pink robots, surfed crowds with a giant bubble, glitter-punk-rocked the snot out of stadiums and tripped fans’ badonks off all over the world for the past three decades will entertain, to say the least, Fargo-Moorhead for the first time ever on July 16.

Currently, The Flaming Lips are in the middle of a fiery Internet explosion. Be sure to check out their outrageous and rad new “SuperFreak” video with Miley Cyrus and Moby. But hide your kids first!

Read the latest Lips news and insights from lead vocalist Wayne Coyne here:

(*Adult language advisory)

High Plains Reader: How’s tour going?

Wayne Coyne: As far as the shows have been going and as far the audience’s response and all that, I don’t mean to sound hokey, but I think these are some of the greatest shows we’ve ever played. I don’t know why, it’s some of the songs we’ve picked, and some of the energy and all that. I don’t know, you just go about it like, here’s what we’re going to do now and sometimes the audience just loves that. They love that you’re moving, you’re doing things and you’re evolving and you’re trying new things.

I know that show at Bonnaroo was just insane. And we knew we had the potential. We were playing on a Saturday night at 12:30 — if you had to measure the peak of when Bonnaroo was going to be happening, it would be at that time. We always want to play at that time. It was pretty great. You look out and you could just see there was an endless sea of a bunch of freaks all engaged in this thing. It was a great feeling.

HPR: You’ve been playing for the last 30 years and these are some of the best shows ever? That’s one of the things I respect about you guys. For all these years, even through musical development, you’ve stayed true to your art and true to yourselves. How?

WC: I think there must be some misconstrued version of how things work. For me, it’s like the longer you do it, the more you are trying to do it, the more you keep doing it, it would seem like it should get easier to figure some of it out.

And also your fear of it not working goes away. So for me, the longer we go, the less fear we have that it won’t work. It makes you more willing just to try whatever. And if it doesn’t work well, we’ll figure something out and move on. I think when you are younger, I would imagine people in their 20s or something, you just feel like, “Oh my god, if it fails everybody will know and it will be embarrassing. What will I do?” It doesn’t matter that much. And I think part of it is we’re lucky that we have some very endearing music.

I mean, to fans of The Flaming Lips, they are long-term music fans. That, I think, is part of it too. We can have songs that goes back to ‘90s now — we still play those. They’re still very powerful and very fresh and I think that’s ‘cause the audience is still involving those sounds. They’re maybe in their late 30s, even in their 40s, but they still have an urge to hear new things and be excited about music and ideas and stuff.

I think a lot of groups don’t have that type of audience. They have an audience that gets bored with the new stuff and just wants to hear the old stuff and go home. Our audience doesn’t. Our audience is always telling us, “Play this and play that.” There’ll be some obscure song that was only in a magazine from 1983 and everybody will be, “Play that! Play that!”

I feel like it’s really the great combination of what we want versus what the audience wants us to do. We always seem to be in sync.

I would say, you could see where that probably propels it more than anything to where it’s like, we want to do something but no one would pay to see it. After a while we’d have to go, “Well, what do we do?” I think that we have just been lucky that the things that we like to do, our audience, for the most part, says, “Cool. Let’s see what the fuck happens.”

HPR: Flaming Lips shows are very, very extravagant. What’s the purpose?

WC: I think it’s because … we like it. I don’t think it could exist or would even be made or would continue to evolve or be done with such joy if we didn’t like it. I just think it’s what we are.

I think there’s some underlying false impression of what we must be to people that I always think people get the feeling that I am going to say, “I know. I wish I could just go up there and play the music.” I have no desire to just go up there and stand there as a man and play music.

To me, it’s always been, I want to look like an angel out of a huge bubble and I can just sing these songs by The Flaming Lips. I don’t really want just to stand there. I want to be a superbeing. And being in The Flaming Lips is kind of like you can become a superhero. If you are able to live the life of a superhero, you should do it. So I do.

I don’t have any desire ever to say, “Oh, let’s not do this; let’s just play music.” I think within our set we already arrive at this balance of saying while this is being sung and while this is happening in the song, let’s not interrupt it with something that will take away the flow and the emotion and communicating. Most of the things we do make the music more expressive and better communicated. I think that’s what all light shows, when it’s done well, [are] supposed to do. It’s supposed to go, “Oh, wow, I knew that was coming. I could feel that coming. I really understood it more.”

I try to explain it like if you went to an art gallery that didn’t have very good lights in the gallery. The art is still really good; you just can’t see it very well. And so, to me, because the music has the potential to be so powerful, we are going to put lights on it so if you are standing 100 yards away, you can feel what we are trying to express.

HPR: Miley Cyrus is perhaps the biggest star in the world right now. What was it like working with her? Did you receive any backlash from fans who perhaps don’t like her lifestyle or music?

WC: Well, yeah. You get that, but I don’t really care. Compared to what she gets on a daily basis, I get nothing. Being around her and seeing the way she works, it’s fucking cool. That’s really all it is. We absolutely love her. I forget sometimes just how famous she is. Because she’s just, to us, this great, cool friend of ours and we love her music, we love her attitude, we love the things that she says about people hating her. [It’s] just inspiring. I loved her before I knew her. I mean that’s why we got to know each other.

You can’t imagine how many artists we’ve brought in that have no sense of humor and they are too serious about how cool they are. And then when you run into someone who could possibly be the biggest star in the world right now and she is so cool and so normal, so smart, so humble, so funny and so giving, it makes you go, “Yeah, no shit. That’s how people should be.” … She’s inspired us more than we’ve inspired her.

HPR: I hear you’re not doing the space bubble anymore. How come?

WC: I am trying to work out another version of it. For the longest time we would open up the show with that, and it wasn’t that we didn’t like it. It was just another one of those things you have to be like, “Well, we did that.” I want to say we did it for almost 10 years. Doesn’t seem possible, but think we started in 2004 and just stopped doing it a year ago or so.

We did it for a long time because it just was a thing that everybody wanted. But I have a feeling that everybody who ever wanted to take picture of it must have one by now (laughs).

It was just when we started to do this new stage show, you don’t know how much energy was spent trying to say, “OK the space bubble has to come out here and it has to land here, you play there,” and it was a great relief not to worry about that bubble being up there on the stage.

IF YOU GO:

Flaming Lips

Wed., July 16, 8 p.m.

The Venue, 2525 9th Ave. S.W., Fargo

All ages, $35