Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips: "I really had no idea how popular Miley was!"

The gentleman in question is Wayne Coyne, front man, genius and sparkling life behind now veteran Oklahoman psych-pop legends The Flaming Lips. Formed in 1983 and with around sixteen albums to their name, Coyne (along with Steven Drozd, the absent Michael Ivins and a cast of supporting musicians) continues to front a band with the ambition to throw the greatest party possible on stage. The thing is, with songs like “She Don’t Use Jelly”, “Waitin’ for a Superman” and “Do You Realize?” the band doesn’t even need the inflatables, visuals, glitter, confetti, etcetera to put on a great show – but they do and it gives us just a small insight into the crazy world of The Flaming Lips. All the visual stuff doesn’t detract from the songs, it enhances the experience and it becomes the most inclusive, communal experience. Thirty years on, there’s absolutely no sign of any loss of zest, wonderment or will to do this from Coyne and his band, so Best Fit grabbed the chance to spend some time with The Flaming Lips, and you can read the results of that time well spent below…

As Coyne tucks into some pretty damn tasty looking frozen yoghurt, I ask him about his first impressions of the festival: “It seems pretty good, and not overly cold for an English festival!” he says with a chuckle. “People like it…a lot of kids here – is that good?” I say that I think it does give the festival a more relaxed vibe and across the weekend so far I’d not noticed any aggressive behaviour, so I think it must remove that a bit? Coyne picks up on the family aspect, saying: “I saw that [children with noise cancelling headphones] a lot last night…I dunno, I guess if you have kids and you don’t get the chance to go to festivals, that’s the downside, right?” I ask if it affected or altered his enjoyment: “We just thought it wasn’t very loud,” says Wayne. “We were standing in front of Temples and there was a lot of kids…so I was wondering if it was not very loud because of them…but there has to be some sort of ordnance, right?” I say that I thought Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks were loud enough, as were the Gene Clark No Other Band…“I didn’t know what that was!” exclaims the Lips front man. “I only found it out this morning – otherwise I would have been there! But that’s the dilemma sometimes, you’re going everywhere and you can’t see everything. But I’m not familiar with those songs…”

The Flaming Lips have such a huge psychedelic party of a stage show it’s gotten to a point where it’s hard to remember Coyne and co on stage without inflatables, animal costume, glitter guns and the ubiquitous hamster ball, so I ask Wayne how things have changed since the band’s early festival experiences: “It seems like when we get invited to play festivals now,” he begins, “we’re there to do the big show. When we used to show up years ago, we’d still try to do the big show but we’d be on a lot earlier in the day. Now, people are more geared to be able to accommodate the big show; they want more stuff…so that’s the thing we’ve noticed more.” Is it easy to pull that off? Are all the festivals accommodating? “We bring a lot of stuff, but now they help us do it all! They want us to do it; it used to be like ‘why are you doing all this shit?’ Now they don’t want us unless we bring all the stuff.” Outside of their own show, The Flaming Lips like to get involved with the rest of the festival-goers: “We’ve always liked to go around, see groups and meet people,” explains Coyne. “I think British festivals are tougher to do that at, though. We would do Lollapalooza in the US [the travelling fest which would truck across country, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake]…but British festivals feel like everyone comes in on a bus, and they play the show and then get the fuck out and play somewhere else. We like to hang around, see the groups and have some kind of attachment to the day, y’know?”

As far as the songs go, I ask Coyne if he ensures that the band stick, generally speaking, to playing “the hits”. He agrees this is nominally what happens: “Well there’s definitely that; when you agree to play at the end of the night there’s got to be something like that. But we wanna play songs that everyone knows! Even at smaller shows you wanna get everybody involved…but within in that there’s always a lot of room to play whatever you want. It’s never drudgery; it’s wonderful to play songs that you get an immediate response to and it’s someone’s favourite song.” While the band does have a fairly epic catalogue of fucked-up pop songs, they are equally well-known for their experimental side and I ask Wayne if they try to ensure that songs from albums like Heady Fwends make appearances, or do the songs [featuring Tame Impala, Ke$ha and Bon Iver] need their guests to work completely? “Well I don’t know if it would matter that much,” admits Coyne. “Some of those songs we’ve never thought about [playing] unless we were gonna do them with the guest. But we’ve played 'Ashes In The Air' quite a bit without Justin Vernon involved. We’ve just never thought about it like that, they’re just songs!” Are there any he wouldn’t touch unless the guest was on board? “There’s a few…the Ke$ha song,” says Coyne, flashing beautifully painted nails as he scratches his mop of salt-and-pepper curls. “She’s such a personality that I don’t think we’d wanna do the song unless she was involved. They are collaborations but on that record specifically they are just Flaming Lips songs with people picked out to do stuff.”

Coyne explains how Heady Fwends differs from their Sgt Pepper’s Beatles tribute record With A Little Help From My Fwends in that those songs (with one glaring exception played in their set later in the evening) aren’t particularly crafted with the idea of playing them live one day. He reveals: “With this new Sgt Pepper’s record we’re doing that again [playing with guests]. Some of those, they’re not ‘us’ doing it…we’ve organised it so that it’s different groups doing different things so it’s a different beast again. We never really know what we’re doing!“ Alongside that, Coyne and Steve Drozd have joined forces with psych band to form Electric Wurms, a band that allows Coyne to play bass and truly indulge his love of psych and noise. It’s a busy time, which Coyne explains doesn’t always have a defined path: “The Electric Wurms is great; we have control but you never really know what’s gonna come out when you’re actually doing it! We thought it was going to be done a bit earlier and we’d have it out by early spring…I forget all the things we were doing that I wasn’t satisfied or whatever, and then we sorta got to work on the Pepper’s record, and the first thing we did is that we got to record with Miley Cyrus.” The decision to lead with the cover of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" happened to complicate The Flaming Lips’ already busy work schedule: "We didn’t know what was going to happen with that,” begins Coyne; “we got it all together and then put out the ‘Lucy’ song. What we didn’t realise was that by putting it out on iTunes and Amazon we had to set a release date for the record, which didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time. Sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of stuff coming together at the same time! “

Ambitious projects such as both the Fwends records must be fraught with dangers and pitfalls like release dates spinning out of control, but I wonder if having some big name guests, Miley and Kesha obviously spring to mind, just adds unnecessary delays to the albums give they are such big names. I say this to Wayne, citing the scrapped plans to release an album with the latter. He explains: “With Ke$ha, I think she wants to be like a Miley Cyrus. She’s not quite in control of all her stuff; I think Ke$ha, most of her records are still made by Dr Luke and it’s a production-esque thing. I mean, she’s a great song writer and she does her own trip, but she doesn’t necessarily have the say in what’s gonna happen. With Miley, I think she does whatever she wants.” I’m intrigued to know what the processes are like when The Flaming Lips get in the studio with Miley Cyrus…who takes the lead? Who comes up with the ideas? “With Miley, we kind of just decide we’re all going to do something and get on with it!” laughs Coyne. “Occasionally it’s like, someone’s the producer and I’m just the person helping them do their thing so I think we easily trade off roles like that. When we’d be at her show, we’re like ‘well let’s just do whatever you want’ and kind of just go with the flow, and when I’m doing my thing she’s the same: ‘I’ll do whatever you want’. It’s not really planned…I think that must be where the ego thing gets in the way. If you come in with some idea of who you are and what it’s supposed to be it probably wouldn’t work. I think me being around her and her being around me we can see that. I don’t care, we just do whatever we wanna do!” It seems the spontaneity and the leaving of the egos at the door is vital, and Coyne agrees: “To me, that’s why I think it’ll work; she’s not trying to be something. She’s awesome. Ke$ha’s situation is different; I think there are some things about her production deal that she’s not happy with. It’s almost three years there’s been fuckin’ around and trying…I think that music will eventually happen with her. I think she’s not quite in command of everything. She’s kinda crazy so maybe that’s not for the worst, I dunno! I love them both but they are different from each other.”

In the last couple of years, and you could argue since 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, there’s been a lot of flak sent in the direction of Coyne and the Lips for not first of all coming back with a series of Yoshimi-style anthems and then secondly choosing to make fucked-up psych music with a wide range of guests. I ask the band leader if he can understand the criticism aimed at him, even though it generally seems to come from precious fans worrying about their hero working with a couple of pop acts. “Yeah, I know, right?” he says with a smile. “I work with so many people but I think those ones are the easiest targets. Those two are the biggest popular artists and I can see where there would be a segment of The Flaming Lips’ audience who’d immediately say ‘no! That’s the enemy!’ and to me, all that stuff is silly. I think if you look at it from the point of knowing what they’re supposed to stand for and what we’re supposed to stand for it could seem ‘wrong’ but to me it’s perfect. We work with so many fuckin’ people and we do all kinds of cool stuff and yet people always wanna pick on that…” Did Coyne ever expect quite the level of vitriol aimed at him, from both fans of his band and fans of Miley Cyrus? “I really had no idea how popular Miley was!” he admits. “It really didn’t occur to me! When we go around LA there would be paparazzi following us…to us, it’s all just funny and when people have such reactions of hatred you just have to laugh at it.” He goes on to say, though, that in the grand scheme of things it’s not much of a worry to him: “There’s a lot of Lips fans that love all these things that we do so when I talk about fans not liking it, it really is just a very small percentage. You can have ten thousand people tell you you’re great but you get one person coming up and saying ‘fuck you’, that’s what sticks in your mind. We try to just take it as it comes; popularity is like that: you get a thousand people saying they love you, one hundred will say they hate you. That’s just the way it works. But when I’ve been around Miley Cyrus, she gets so much of that. But her fans….they would die for her! And I think that’s what gets the other side, and I guess that’s where the hate comes from…”

As the time presses on, I ask Wayne if he can think of his best and worst festival experiences with The Flaming Lips. Just as he’s about to come up with an answer, we’re joined by drummer/guitarist Derek Brown…

Wayne Coyne: “I’m trying to think of what would be the worst….do we have a worst that we’ve done lately?”

Derek Brown: “The corn one, dude! The Canadian fairgrounds festival…”

WC: “Well I didn’t think it was a bad experience…I mean no-one got killed!”

DB: “Ohhh, that guy got killed at Pemberton! That was a bummer – got his head smashed in with rocks, bludgeoned! But I tend to think we have a good time anywhere we go…but that rainy day at the Canadian fairgrounds was just a bit of a bummer…”

WC: “You’re talking gloom and doom though? I’m sure there were…I just can’t remember anything!”

As Brown leaves the conversation, Coyne recalls an experience from the mid-1990s: “I’d always think back to Lollapalooza in 1994; we’d play early in the day and then we’d just get to hang out and watch bands play…Nick Cave, Beastie Boys, all these bands we’d get to hang out with. It was amazing!” He goes on to recall another British festival appearance: “There was that time with Yoshimi right after it came out where we’d get to play all the festivals; we played one in Scotland where the White Stripes cancelled [2003’s T In the Park] and they came to us at the last minute to fill in. We played ‘Seven Nation Army’ and it was just at the right time for everyone to say ‘it’s cool!’. Those sort of moments in time stick with you. We played one time at Glastonbury where we played and Radiohead played right after us. They were doing Hail to the Thief shows, and to me – and I’d seen them before then – that’s where it changed to just a better, more powerful, more expressive, cooler thing. We got to sit right on the side of the stage and they were so fuckin’ great, in their element. I mean, I thought our show was fine but to see that afterwards – those are the things that make a great festival.”

The Flaming Lips headlined this year's End of the Road Festival. Wayne was photographed for Best Fit by Burak Cingi.