In which I buckle up and write about the Flaming Lips.
You know something? I’m horribly lazy. I’ve been meaning to write this for god-knows-how-long and I’ve consistently failed. No more! I delayed writing about Rock Ness because it seemed such a daunting task. It was a long weekend of overload: on silly hats, Vitamin Water (hey, they were handing it out free), bright colours, mud, chocolate digestives and most of all, music. So I’ll break it up. While I do intend to draw a few cartoons on the Rock Ness Festival Experience, they’re not what I’m going to be writing about (music blog! music blog!), and I’ll break things up, writing other posts between them. I probably won’t cover everything, but the major points are The Flaming Lips, Alabama 3, Biffy Clyro and Placebo. Maybe the Super Furry Animals but I’m not sure how much that’d contradict the positive outlook of this blog (just to clarify, I do still love them!) Anyway, without further ado: The Flaming Lips.
~*imaginary cut which would be there if Opera was co-operating goes here*~
It is difficult to describe the Flaming Lips’ stagecraft. The first thing you must understand, to get even the slightest idea of what it was like, is that the backing dancers were dressed as Teletubbies, and they arrived, as far as I can tell, by helicopter. There was also a terrifying gigantic butterfly that swayed from side to side in an unsettling fashion through every song it was on stage for.
Oh, and Wayne Coyne was riding the back of a werewolf two songs in.
And the whole streamers/confetti/giant balloons/Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball thing.
Except, surreal as all of this seemed, there was the sense that all of this is perfectly normal and to be expected in Flaming Lips Land. Not to the extent it feels mundane, though – before playing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt One, Coyne recounted hearing a crowd singing it back to him with a genuine sense of emotion and warmth towards his fans.
You could say their commitment to playing old material that most of the audience (including myself) weren’t going to be familiar with along with the popular songs was part of that; She Don’t Use Jelly definitely felt like a moment for fans, but one that the band’s heart was in. What comes across incredibly strongly in Coyne’s stage banter, the exuberant stageshows and the music that is distinctly theirs is a knowledge that what they do makes people happy, and it makes them happy too. And that’s something that feels incredibly beautiful. At one point, he tells us that music doesn’t change the world, people who smile and make others smile do, optimists, people with hope and people who do good things. When he said that, I hoped that he knew he was all of these things.
With the brilliant finale of Do You Realize??, he gave an introduction stating how amazing it was to know that there’d be people in the crowd feeling genuinely upset, and that their music could make a difference to that. So I guess they do know. I’m glad they know. I’m glad I was there. I’m glad their music is there.
