Photo by George Salisbury, courtesy of The Flaming Lips and Mofo 2016
The Flaming Lips are a busy band. Theyâre always busy. Since they formed in the early '80s in Oklahoma City, theyâve been busy recording albums, orchestrating mindblowing live shows, touring the world, making films, running their own gallery, and collaborating with other artists as vast and varied as Henry Rollins and Yoko Ono. Theyâre not just a band, theyâre a creative force to be reckoned with. The Flaming Lips are often described as one of the best live acts on the planet, which is in no small part due to their spectacle-laden performance, which incorporates everything from balloons to puppets, giant eyeballs to glitter bombs. Excitingly, The Flaming Lips have just been announced as a headliner for Mofo, the music and arts festival at Tasmaniaâs Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). We caught up with the effusive and mildly hyperactive Wayne Coyne to talk about installations, inspirations, Miley Cyrus (another collaborator), and why he's so excited to play Mofo next January.The Creators Project: I see youâve been working on your art installation The Kingâs Mouth. It looks pretty awesome.Wayne Coyne: Well, thank you! So with The Kingâs Mouth, you literally just lay down on this big tongueâitâs kind of like a big bedâand you look up at these LED strings. These are pretty new technologies that makes thisâitâs not a hologram but it makes this holographic image thatâs all 3D and itâs literally around you. Itâs pretty great.Sheâs young and sheâs got this confidence and this thing, and sheâs good at it. I think that propels her to say, âI can do it.â She knows that she can and sheâs up for the challenge, and I like that!Youâll have to design a stage show for this tour, right? How do you go about doing that?Itâs a lot of experience with a bit of imagination and a lot of âletâs just try it and see what happensâ. I think that some of our greatest things have kind of happened by accident. They just sort of happened and we said, âWow, we should do that on purpose.â But itâs also about communicating with the audience. As much as I wish I could understand it, music still does have some kind of magical hold on our minds. The visuals and all that are great and it joins everybody in [to the experience], but really the depth is in the music and what weâre trying to communicate. The lights and all of that are really just to shut the rest of the world out.That must feel pretty good hearing someone say that.Yeah! Itâs like maximum penetration. We did that thing. It isnât like we do it and itâs like, âOh, all those people.â It also affects usâwith that love, we feel it too.Talking about going to the movies⊠I remember going to the movies as a kid and feeling like no time had passed. As you get older I think it gets harder to replicate that time out of life, but thatâs what your shows do.I think youâre right, and I think it is easier when youâre younger because you donât have all of these experiences telling you, âOh, I know what this is.â When youâre younger you are just more open to things. The things that impress you when youâre younger, they guide you to the things that you can do when youâre older. Then youâre doing them and youâre part of them, as opposed to just experiencing them. I saw The Who play in 1977, I was only sixteen, and maybe they werenât at their maximum power but on this night it was a pretty powerful, communal sort of show. Everybody in there was electrified. The people standing next to you, you could feel how much it was getting into them. I walked away from that thinking, âIâd like to do that. I wanna do that every night,â and so here I am. There are those things that do have that kind of effect on you; it shapes who you get to become.What's your experiene with MONA?Of all the museums that weâve visited travelling around the world as we have, weâve all remarked itâs like the greatest museum weâve ever visited and wished that there were more like it around the world. This idea that now we get to go back to MONAâbecause we would have visited anywayâbut that we get to go there and actually be part of the thing isâwe couldnât have asked for a better circle of coincidence.Itâs really changed the game for galleries and museums in Australia.Youâre definitely right. We travel with a big group of mostly guys, and thereâs a few of us who will always be going to art galleries and museums and stuff. And a big group of guys will go and be bored after about twenty minutes, but this was spectacular; it took us three or four hours of looking to see it all. Since we were there weâve still talked about the things that we saw.Were there any pieces that stood out particularly?I guess you would call it a sort of statue; itâs made of chocolate and itâs a rendering of a person who was blown up by a terrorist bomb. As you look at it you can see that itâs this half torso of a person and their guts are trailing out, and then you realise, âOh my god! Itâs made of chocolate!â I canât say why it affected us so much, but I remember that being one that we all went back to. It was stunning.The Flaming Lips are a highlight artist for Mofo 2016, which places more than 300 artists in Hobart and at Mona itself, from January 13â18. Find out more and buy tickets here.The Flaming Lips are also headlining Sydney Festival 2016's Summer Sounds in the Domain on January 9 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, which is a free concert. Find out more here.Related:How to Make Paintings from Psychedelic DrugsDude Builds Flamethrowing Organ: Blows MindsAn Urban-Scale Light Show Splices The Sky Over Tasmania
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Do you have any other projects on the go?Weâve got this ongoing thing with Miley Cyrus. Weâre talking pretty seriously about doing a bit of touring together [Editors note: it has since been announced that Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips will do a limited US tour this November/December]. Itâs not daunting, itâs just crazy, because sheâs got her own whims of, âHey, I want to do this, I want to do that,â and weâre like, âOK.â But I have to say, I love that. As much as anyone Iâve met, sheâs willing to work and work and work and work and work until she can make it happen. I donât think a lot of people realise that about herâthat she really is insanely driven and she really just works and works. Itâs uncanny sometimes.Iâm almost afraid of people like that!A photo posted by Wayne Coyne (@waynecoyne5) on Sep 22, 2015 at 12:38am PDT
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Do you think itâs important to be working on lots of different creative projects at one time?Theyâre not that different to me [the projects], but I would say yes, for anybody who is lucky enough not to be stuck doing the same thing day in day out. I think it always helps to be able to get another perspective, to wake up the next day and not be able to finish the thing, and then go back a week later and be like, âOh what was I worried about? This part is great!â We [The Flaming Lips] are like all artists, thereâs an element of fearlessness but youâre also very doubtful about your stuff having any quality at all.Youâre still doubtful? Even now?I know the best thing to do is to just start to do it. Your originality and your imagination and the things like that, they show up only in the things that you do. I listen to people all the time who claim they have imagination and all that, and Iâm like, âYou canât say you have imagination! Weâll be able to see it from what you do.â Itâs what you do that mattersânot what you think, or what you read, or what you say.Itâs also like, if you do things, it creates a kind of energy and a pathway to the next thing.Youâre exactly right. That is a valuable little thingâto think that a novelist could think of every word before he started writing, itâs just absurd. All creative things are really done the same way, whether itâs a song or a building bridge or a haircut. Itâs all the same sort of mechanism.
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So youâre curating a space to communicate the music?Right. When you go to see a movie youâre basically trading your life for the lives on the screen. You can literally walk in from your life and be acting normal and happy and not have any real worries, and twenty minutes later you could be crying at someoneâs love life. Itâs really just actors on a screen that you donât really even know but you let it affect you. Thatâs what we try our best to do when weâre making a showâto obliterate everything else thatâs going on in this moment and let it be a moment between us. Itâs a great duty, if you want to call it that. I have people come up all the time and say, âIâve never cried at a concert like Iâve cried at yours.â And Iâm like, âWell, good!â
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