Extravagance is The Flaming Lips’ stock in trade.
Their last few visits to Manchester alone have involved frontman Wayne Coyne performing, variously, from astride a neon inflatable unicorn (Academy, 2019), among a menagerie of inflatable aliens (Apollo, 2014) and, of course, from within his signature zorb ball (both of those shows, plus the Academy in 2017 and Jodrell Bank’s Bluedot Festival in 2018).
To see the Lips, then, is to expect them to pull out all the stops, but perhaps never quite like this; for their first Manchester show since the pandemic brought a whole new meaning to Coyne performing inside an inflatable bubble, they arrive at the Apollo in nostalgic form, marking not just twenty years of their beloved tenth LP, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, but forty years together as a band, too.
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To celebrate, they put on a bumper show; no support, two Lips sets. “I think the deadline is eleven o’clock, so we’re going to play until then,” says Coyne shortly after taking the stage at 8:15pm, and he’s as good as his word; first, we get Yoshimi front-to-back, the band employing two drummers and earth-shaking bass to bring the electronic concept odyssey to life, flanked on stage by four of the eponymous mechanoids in inflatable form.
A huge LED screen, meanwhile, relays lurid psychedelic visuals as well as the lyrics to every song, inviting audience participation, but actually, the first set is a reminder of what a mellow record Yoshimi is, even when Coyne is firing glitter cannons into the crowd or swinging a strobe light around his head.
There’s light guitar jangle - ‘Fight Test’, the two parts of the title track - and blissed-out synthpop, on ‘It’s Summertime’ and ‘Are You a Hypnotist??’ The anthemic ‘Do You Realize??’, performed in front of a giant blow-up rainbow, provides an obvious highlight, but so does a shimmering ‘Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell’.
If set one provided the sensory overload we’ve come to expect from the Lips, the second half - after a brief intermission - is a different beast entirely, featuring both classic material and newer deep cuts.
The playful ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ and ‘Moth in the Incubator’ both inspire singalongs, while a leftfield cover of Madonna’s ‘Borderline’ is similarly giddy, but the more recent tracks are more reflective, especially a gorgeously woozy ‘How??’ from 2017’s underrated Oczy Mlody. In the main, Coyne reins in the stagecraft, too, and the pink robots have taken their leave.
It’s proof that there’s more to The Flaming Lips than just wild theatrics; Coyne doesn’t even pull his ultimate party trick of roaming across the crowd in his zorb ball tonight, although he does play a few songs from within it onstage. A euphoric encore closes with perhaps the most joyous of all Lips tracks, ‘Race for the Prize’, as a huge balloon reading ‘F*** YEAH MANCHESTER’ is floated out over the crowd, but this comprehensive show had plenty more to it - a celebration of the band’s past, and their present, too.
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