For two decades Flaming Lips have doggedly made music their ownpeculiar way. Tony Clayton-Lea discovers that the Oklahoma firestill sizzles
It's taken almost 20 years for Flaming Lips to become an overnight sensation, but as even latent fans of the Oklahoma band realise, the wait was worth it. For a unit that fused together in the noisy maelstrom of 1980s American hardcore music, the journey has been particularly circuitous.
It is said of Flaming Lips that they wanted to experiment but simply weren't skilled enough, so the racket they made sounded quite unique - a raw, nascent group trying to do things they couldn't do, but eventually finding its creative niche and succeeding. Where have we heard that before?
Yet how they got from a Hüsker Dü/Stooges/Butthole Surfers hybrid to their latterly spatial pop/folk output (think a zonked-out Neil Young writing songs with Cat Stevens, add a touch of lysergically-animated Barry Manilow and you're halfway there) is anyone's guess. Flaming Lips have a theory, however: rules were meant to be broken.
Such ripping up of the rulebook has, notably over the past five years or so, afforded Flaming Lips the kind of hyperbole most bands dream of but never attain. Regularly, this purple-prose praise is of the Coolest-Band-in-the-Universe variety, something that makes lead singer Wayne Coyne sigh into his wispy, greying beard.
"I look at a lot of magazines and they may describe us as 'the coolest band in the universe' at the beginning of the issue, but towards the back they're calling another band the exact same thing. I don't mean to put them down, but magazines like NME need 20 coolest bands in the universe for it to be the coolest magazine. So, even though it's a compliment, I don't think of it as being real.
"If we're perceived as being that today, then fine, but it's not a title you can aspire to. You're given it and you say thanks."
Coyne is the linchpin behind Flaming Lips, his creative mind occasionally running too fast for his own good, playing catch-up with technology, dismissing musical trends and only latterly achieving what he set out to do many years previously. He loves pop music, and says the fact that it's transient makes the idea of it even better.
"It's not meant to save the world," he remarks. "It's meant to act like it can save the world. If your world is great already, then why would you need pop music to save the world, you know? That said, music needs this kind of celebration, to say that this band or that person creates the best music ever. Music is so subjective, which means its power can't be measured. Some music can be totally meaningless to me, but the same song can alter other people's lives immeasurably.
"Any music that's given to people can make that kind of thing happen. It's happened to me. The argument that there is good and bad music doesn't really apply - if you like it and it moves you and it changes you, then it's doing its job whether it's Backstreet Boys or Björk. It doesn't really matter. To me, that's good news, rather than there being a set of criteria that scientifically says this band is good or that band is bad. There is no maths to it. In music, let's leave it up to the listener.
"With that in mind, you can never count bands like us out. Because there is no criterion, we just might sell 10 million records one day. Not that we'd know how, but the idea that anything is possible is great."
From their indie label début in 1986, Hear It Is, to their major label début in 1992, Hit to Death in the Future Head, Flaming Lips struggled with ideas, execution and musical identity. Toying with cracked psychedelia (song titles such as One Million Billionth of a Millisecond, The Ceiling Is Bending and Hell's Angel Cracker Factory may provide a clue) and spine-tingling orchestral pop, it took Coyne and a revolving-door musician policy some years to evolve their own special blueprint. This included 1997's Zaireeka, a sonic experiment divided over four separate CDs, the music making full sense only when the discs were played simultaneously.
"The thing is not to have rules about music," says Coyne, dovetailing practice with theory. "Early on, I went through the phase of judging people on their record collections, which is a bad thing to do.
"If people are reborn or moved by any music, then that's good. That's what let us relax about learning that music doesn't have to be one way. Being able to embrace what music can do, the unexpected nature, is the best thing.
"In the early part of our career, we weren't able to be beautiful if we wanted to be. We couldn't be emotional because we didn't understand the way music worked, how harmonies worked. The idea that we could be not only disturbing but also beautiful - that somewhere in the middle maybe we could get to where we could say what's on our minds - has been the biggest relief, the biggest epiphany for us."
If you try to be original, he says, what you're working on will never really deviate from the average. If you're lucky, he intimates, the results will be no more and no less than happy accidents. "It's more letting the doing rather than the thinking do the work. That's the thing that some people don't realise about art - they think you have to think it all the way through. But it's actually do and then think, instead of thinking about it first."
In music, what's there to lose? If Coyne were a heart surgeon, he reckons that he'd have to think it all through. "But it's music - so let's start to play it and hope that something exciting happens. In music, in art, trying counts. In sports, you have to win sooner or later. In the arts, trying is valued."
Flaming Lips's new album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, was released yesterday