The Flaming Lips are one of a few bands who have managed to stay both relevant and interesting over a career that has spanned nearly four decades. They found mainstream success with 1999’s The Soft Bulletin – voted NME’s album of the year – followed by 2002’s equally brilliant Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Since then, they’ve won three Grammys and, in 2018, an award for their song Tomorrow Is written – very appropriately – for SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.
And that’s exactly the thing about the Flaming Lips. Even diehard fans can’t predict what in the name of Wayne Coyne’s beard they’re going to do next. Who else would have covered the whole of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and curated a reworking of the Stone Roses’s debut LP? Or got around the whole Covid social distancing thing by getting the audience to stand in their own personal inflatable plastic bubbles? (Don’t ask what happened if you needed the toilet.)
Much of this madness comes from lovably bonkers frontman Coyne, who likes to descend on stage from a UFO, float across the audience in a giant hamster ball and cover himself in fake blood. Who else would have closed down Oklahoma City airport after accidentally forgetting he was carrying his lucky hand grenade? Who has matching tattoos with Miley Cyrus? Who you can apparently see taking a bath in his garden if you look hard enough on Google Street View?
So in preparation for the Flaming Lips headlining Womad in Wiltshire at the end of July, please post your questions for Wayne Coyne – the weirder the better – in the comments below, by 6pm on Thursday. We’ll do our best to make sense of the great man when we print his answers in Film & Music and online on 8 July. But god forbid, don’t ask where the name Flaming Lips comes from, as we can’t possibly print the answer this side of the watershed.
