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.
