Photo by George Salisbury
Between releasing the Flaming Lips' 15th studio album—King’s Mouth—on July 17, and welcoming his first child on June 6, you’d think Wayne Coyne’s life has been turned upside down. However, it takes a lot more than fatherhood and a massive summer tour to phase the famed frontman.
“We thought we have such a wonderful, colorful,happy life. We just want to have him be in it,” Coyne says of his new family.
However, there was one time he felt therestrictions of new parenthood.
“[My family and I] were driving down thehighway, and suddenly a cop car is chasing after this white minivan. This guy’strying to run from the cops,” he recalls. “And we said, ‘Fuck, let’s followthem and see what happens!’ And I start going 90, 95, and then we both look ateach other and realize, ‘We have a baby in here, we can’t do that!’ That’s theonly time we kind of lost our minds for just, you know, just about 20 seconds.So yeah, we’re getting used to it.”
Below, Coyne talks about teaming up with theClaypool Lennon Delirium for their summer tour, enlisting Mick Jones of TheClash to narrate King’s Mouth andmore.
TheFlaming Lips teamed up with the Claypool Lennon Delirium to tour this summer.How’s it been going so far?
Well, you know, it’s funny because I’ve knownLes [Claypool] even from way back in the days when Primus started in San Francisco.I mean, I don’t know him well, but we’ve always kind of played things, and we’dbe there together, or whatever. And even when Primus got back together, we didfestivals and stuff together, so we’d be backstage.
I hadn’t seen Sean [Lennon] in a little while.And have known him really since the mid-90s, I think. I’m trying to think ofwhen his band, Cibo Matto, they came through Oklahoma City, and I remembergoing to see them and meeting him, and his mother--you know, Yoko Ono--had sentflowers to the show, and I remember him saying, “Take these flowers, they’refrom my mother.” And you’re like, ‘“Oh, how crazy.”
They’ve done quite a few shows already thissummer before we joined up. They can do like an hour and a half, and we can doan hour and a half, and it can be like, you know, some of the same like-mindedfans and some fans that will see--on each side see like a new group, you know.And we also have Particle Kid. They’re really awesome. We’ve been trying to getthem, you know, on some shows four or five years ago I think.
It’s a marvelous, perfect kind of tour.
Do youthink the door is open for you jumping on stage with Les and Sean, or themjumping on stage with the Flaming Lips?
I don’t know. I think people overestimate mymusical ability. You know, I’m in the Flaming Lips, it’s a very musical group,and I am able to do my own music, but I can’t really jam. I mean the only way Ican jam is the way that I jam with the Flaming Lips, which is like, I dosomething and everybody follows me, you know? I always say that’s the mark of areally great group is the main guy, he doesn’t really know what to do, and theband makes it sound like he really knows what he’s doing. And the Flaming Lipsdefinitely do that with me. I’ll lead the charge and have no musical idea ofwhere it’s going, and because they’re so intuitive and so musical and so good.It makes it look like I’m leading the charge, but I’m really not, I’m justholding on the best I can.
Les will go up there and do a soundcheck, andit’s like, “Oh, I’m not in the same league as him.” And Sean is just such afreak. He really is. He is so musical. I mean he’s always up there trying tofigure out some new, unknown chord sequence that no one’s ever played. And I’mstill just struggling to get a good normal chord sequence that I can rememberand play.
Maybe I can go up there and play like atheremin or something. Something that doesn’t really require too much.
Tell mea little bit about getting Mick Jones from The Clash to play the narrator onthe Flaming Lips new record, King’s Mouth.
Steven [Drozd of the Flaming Lips] and I arestill trying to figure out this accent that [Mick Jones] has. We feel like it’sslightly upper class, you know, little warbly-mouthed, but in the best, sort ofgentle, eccentric kind of English way. And, yeah, we absolutely loved TheClash, and unfortunately, they broke up right as the Flaming Lips were startingto get together right there in the early ‘80s. And then Mick Jones went on todo Big Audio Dynamite. And so Don Letts, who’s in Big Audio Dynamite with MickJones, he’s come to several of our shows, and we have a mutual friend in a galsongwriter, her name is Georgia. And she lives right next door to Don Letts andhis family. They came to one of the shows, and I know he knows Mick Jones, so Isaid, “Hey, do you think you could get Mick to do some narration on a FlamingLips album?” And he just says, “Well, Mick won’t want to do it, but I’ll gethim to do it.” And I really didn’t think that much of it. I thought, “Well,that’ll be great if he can, but if not I’ll see what comes of it.” And about amonth later, all this stuff came back.
He’s not placed on every song, but almost everysong on the album. Some of them, we literally built the song around him, andjust sort of said, “Well, we’ve got this, let’s make this work.” And I thinkonce we got him on to some of the songs, it just started meaning more and more.
I think at the very beginning, we thought itcould even just be an abstract, kind of instrumental album. The stuff thatplays in the “King’s Head” art installation is two of the compositions thatended up being “Mother Universe” and “Electric Fire”—they’re the songs that actually play inside theinstallation.
I kind of think it just kind of spurred us on to do more song-oriented stuff, and to give this story a real voice and a real sort of atmosphere. It really did surprise us that it became this cohesive thing, because in the beginning we were very content that it could just be some weird instrumentals and that would be fine.
You’vepreviously said that your drawings helped pull the story out of the King’s Mouth instrumentals. Do you findyourself often starting with visuals and then building music out of it?
Everything is always going back and forth.With most of our records, even going back to our very first record that we madein 1983, at some point, I want to put together what would be the album cover.It’s always good that you sort of get a vibe and a feeling for what it’s goingto be. Like for The Soft Bulletinalbum cover, I knew that I wanted to use that photograph. I already designed itbefore the album was finished. And the last maybe 25 percent of The Soft Bulletin was made with thatcover in mind.
The way I say it, is “I don’t know what it’ssupposed to be, but I know what it’s not.” We did some music that I felt like,“It doesn’t seem like it goes with this,” and then we would move on tosomething else.
With YoshimiBattles the Pink Robots, same thing. We were about halfway done with that,and I had come up with the title YoshimiBattles the Pink Robots, and then I drew a little, real quick sketch that Ithink really does resemble the way that that painting looks on the cover. Ithink right then we already knew, “Okay, we’re going to make this sort ofcartoon-y sci-fi, you know, Asian, concept album,” even though most of thealbum was already finished, and it wasn’t really a concept album. But in thevery end we threw three or four things on there that mention robots. Thatsealed its fate.
I’mglad you brought up The Soft Bulletin. InFebruary, you reunited withthe Colorado Symphony to do a full album recreation.What’s the most satisfying part about doing those big collaborations with thatmany instruments behind you?
Before it’s happening, you can just imaginehow rich and how dramatic and how precise, and all that stuff it’s going to be.And then when it’s over, it’s wonderful to sit there, and have the freedom tomix it and do all this stuff with this great, gigantic performance. But whenyou’re in the middle of it, it’s hell. [Laughs.]
The dilemma is you never have very much time.And in the Flaming Lips world, when we make records, we literally will takeyears to make a record. When you’re doing these things with this big ensemble—for this show at Red Rocks with the ColoradoSymphony, I mean, it ended up being 80 people, which sort of grew day by day,you know? And there’s no time really to rehearse, and there’s very little timeto set up to record, and though it’s at Red Rocks Amphitheater, outside ofDenver, which is, you know, it’s one of the great American venues, it reallyis--I mean The Beatles played there, Jimi Hendrix played there, I think IgorStravinski even played there, it’s insane. But, it is outdoors in the middle ofsome giant rocks, tucked on a mountain side, you know? It’s not, you know, it’snot a well-crafted, you know, for sound.
There’sa lot of variables there, for sure.
And on this particular night, it was slightlyrainy, and it was cold. I mean, the audience loves it. The audience doesn’tcare. Everybody still came and loved it just as much. But, you know, delicatefingers trying to play these delicate instruments back there, it’s a challenge.
In King’s Mouth, the arc of the story isquite dark at times, yet, it ends on an optimistic, happy note. Why did you chooseto flip the story that way? Do we all need more optimism in our lives?
[Laughs] Well, I do find that if the FlamingLips work on something long enough, no matter what it starts out being, it kindof gets this flavor to it. I think Dennis [Coyne] the engineer and Dave Fridmanthe producer and Steven, they all just latch on to it and make it more rich.But I also feel like that must just be part of my nature. That I’m alreadysetting it up to be this way. Because I said the same thing about even someelements of The Terror, which I sayis our grimmest record. The Terror isfull of a kind of anxiety, but I still think you listen to it, and it’s stilloptimistic even amidst all the sort of chaotic, grey world that it’s goingthrough. I think you’d know that if you are around me, and all the people thatare around me. Regardless of what’s really happening, we would find the fun andthe good and the light and the reason to be happy. Maybe that’s not always sogood for music, it’s like your fingerprints just get all over this thing, andyou can’t remove them. It’s like shaping clay, you know? Once you get a hold ofit, you keep shaping it, and it does kind of resemble us. And I think in thatway, I’m really quite glad, you know?
