The Flaming Lips
“Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerers of death’s construction…”
Recently the world’s top bookmakers employed the use of a bank of supercomputers the size and depth of Uganda to give them the odds that I’ll manage to make it through this review without resorting to sycophantic gushing… The results are in… They don’t look good.
So lets start by making things more palatable for the digestion by starting out like this: The support act for The Flaming Lips’ performance of April 25th at the Manchester Apollo were The Go! Team… And they’re just shit.
First off I’d just like to say that any band that references their name in their songs should be shot on site. It’s pathetic. “Hey guys why waste time and effort thinking about conveying a message or feeling within the subtext of our music when we could just moronically chant G. O. Exclamation Mark. T. E. A. M. over and over again while whatever the hell our drummers name is ‘tards out to his own insanity ridden twitching and the rest of us pretend we know what a guitar chord is?” So what’s left is a combination of completely pointless and unnecessary vocals shouted by some woman with an odd disorder that completely prevented her from controlling their movement in an alarming display of what we’ve termed post-feminist lesbian crap out of respect to Becky and her sometimes staggeringly godawful taste in shitty shouty indie music from some woman or another.
Perhaps it was for the best. We’d all bought drinks and having a shit act on avoided the awkward moment when the band finishes playing and you need to get your plastic glass in to some ridiculous position that enables you to clap without spilling fermented wheat and yeast liquid all over your clothes.
Previous excursions to the Apollo meant we could now find it with only a 30% margin for error. This was fairly lucky because our usual patented technique of ‘following the indie-kids’ wasn’t going to work… Don’t know what they were up to that night but they sure as hell weren’t spending it with the ‘Lips. Also Dom had come up for the gig and we’d have looked like knobs getting lost in a city we’d spent three years living in.
The Flaming Lips have been around for 23 years and spent a large portion of the early years at least on tour. Recently they’ve had numerous festival appearance and toured with the likes of Beck and The White Stripes. Surely at some point, during one of these gigs, at some moment someone could have explained the concept of a roadie to them. The poor lads are up on stage bringing out their gear when most bands would be safely backstage drinking and injecting heroin.
Many bands will struggle to get to grips with the concept of audience participation. They either don’t bother, do bother but realises that nobody cares (hello to the support bands for Pitchshifter’s last tour), or reduce themselves to shouting about how they ain’t being loud enough. Wayne Coyne’s solution is this: Get into a giant inflatable bubble and have yourself rolled on top of the audience for a few minutes.
Not sure what it is about the human psyche but you seem to warm to a band after the lead singers rolled over you in a giant bubble. Then there were the balloons. Hundreds and hundreds of large red balloons bouncing around over the audience. Amusing at first it did get a bit annoying after a while, but was worth it to watch someone in front of me carefully lining up a picture on his camera phone only for a balloon to twat him on the side of the head making him drop his phone. God that made me chuckle… Wayne himself had a plethora of even larger balloons to try and attempt to throw up into the stalls… A plight that the audience got behind with vigour.
Then there was the talking. Dear God when that man starts off on a train of thought you know you’re in for the long haul. Cutting edge topics ranged from how much he was enjoying himself to George Bush being a bit of a tosser when all’s said and done. Can’t argue to much because unlike some of the other great talkers in music history, namely pretentious self-centred toss-monkey Bono, Wayne was quick to admit that he wasn’t going to change the world, he just needed a bit of a rant… And that he then followed the rant with an amazing cover of Sabbath’s War Pigs is all the justification I need.
Music and visuals were expectantly playful, with the highlight of the gig potentially being the song written around the duck and cow noises from kiddies play toy ‘Animal Band’… Or perhaps the super-chilled rendition of ‘In The Morning Of Magicians’ that would have inevitably yielded many lighters were it not bound to play havoc with the balloons. Visually the standout moment was probably the odd cartoon that was barely visible from behind the wall of epileptic inducing light boxes, or perhaps the videos of Japanese women being terrorised by lizards in some game show that played behind ‘Free Radicals’.
On a final note: Michael Ivins cheer up. Life can’t be that bad… You’re making a fair amount of money I’d imagine. Just give us a wave or a smile every now and then… Try some crack, might brighten things up for you a bit.
Returning: Phil
