INTERVIEW: Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips
- Andrew Duncan
Wayne Coyne has spent nearly half of his life shaking up the alternative and college rock worlds. Inspired by bands from Pink Floyd to Black Flag, the Flaming Lips has set new musical standards and turned the heads of many performers. With their formation in 1983 and the release of their 1986 debut, Hear It Is..., the band has spent years transforming themselves into one of the biggest independent success stories around. Their first release for Warner Brothers, Hit to Death in the Futurehead, was a turning point for their career, and is considered by many to be their biggest influencing album to date.
Throughout the years, band members have come and gone, with guitarist Ronald Jones being the most recent to depart, reducing the band to a three piece: Coyne (vocals, guitars and various tasks), Seven Drozd (drums, guitars and other stuff) and Michael Ivins (bass, guitars and vocals). Soon after Jones left the band, Drozd suffered hand injuries from a spider bite. The band almost broke up when doctors were considering amputation. Luckily, his hand healed, and the band was back in business. Coyne even wrote a song about this event on their upcoming release The Soft Bulletin.
With their last effort, Clouds Taste Metallic, the band took a linear approach to their music, creating solid pop songs. For The Soft Bulletin, Coyne added sampled loops, orchestration and various effects.
Veering away from their psychedelic pop and acoustic meandering, the band is looking at new ways to create music. With the Zaireeka release -- a four-CD set meant to be played simultaneously -- in 1997, and their Boombox Experiments, featuring a gathering of boom boxes orchestrated to play different sounds, they changed the definition of a traditional live concert.
Gaining experience from these events, the band took their live shows one step further by issuing audience members headphones and a radio set that has a direct feed into the sound board. Named the Headphone Concerts, this allowed the person to hear the actual show from one ear and a crystal-clear mix from the other.
CONSUMABLE ONLINE: So, the band is about to embark on another world tour in support of The Soft Bulletin. When does this begin?
WAYNE: The tour will begin in the middle of July. We actually played some dates in Europe the end of May.
CO: Will you continue doing the headphone concerts for this tour?
WAYNE: We will probably be doing it on all of our concerts from now on. Technically, it's easy to do. I don't know why someone else has not done it already. With the technological quality of stereo equipment at home and in your vehicle, people really do get used to hearing quality sound. The worse sound that you hear is at a concert. I go to concerts a lot and coming up with the headphone concert idea was mostly of my own amusement.
CO: Will you be performing mostly new or older material?
WAYNE: We will be doing mostly new. We will be doing some older songs. We always gravitate more to the hits of the past. When I go to see a band and I want to hear their older material, I want them to be their best songs.
CO: Now that the band is a three piece, will there be anyone to fill the shoes live?
WAYNE: We were actually considering adding tour members, but that was an excuse not to consider it at all. When I was doing the boombox experiments, it was all the more reason not to have a proper touring band. We are just using backing tape. It's like loud Karaoke. We have done 15 or 16 shows like this and we didn't know what people would think. It's a lot of hassle. People are so used to seeing bands setting up so many microphones and equipment, it seems to throw people for a loop. It's so different than the way we used to do things.
CO: What bands have you seen recently that you have been particularly impressed with?
WAYNE: Belle and Sebastian, Mercury Rev and Sleater-Kinney.
CO: How about shows that have influenced your life?
WAYNE: We did shows with the Buttonhole Surfers that permanently changed our lives. They had fire and naked women -- all of the things that entertain you. We did some shows with Black Flag. The more we toured and the more experienced we became, the less impressed we were. I'm 38 years old, and I don't know if anything can change my life like some concerts do to young people.
CO: With the new album, you enlisted R&B producer Peter Mokran (Michael Jackson and R. Kelly). Why did you choose him to rework some of the band's songs?
WAYNE: He is a fairly successful commercial guy. We were shopping around for a commercial producer who has had some hits. We had a list of 200 top commercial producers. Our criteria for them were to like our music. That narrowed it down to six. Mokran did not know why we wanted our songs remixed. He thought they sounded fine the way they were.
CO: Why did the band take the approach to explore more with string arrangements and various effects?
WAYNE: We make records and explore what we feel is interesting at the time. It's basically a typical evolution of ideas. We feel more confident in ourselves. We didn't just walk into it; we went into it with the mindframe of exploring different sounds.
CO: Did recording in upstate New York influence you in any way?
WAYNE: There is a certain amount of isolation. We recorded some of the songs in Chicago with Peter around Christmas. There were millions of people bustling around and it was no different than being out in the middle of nowhere.
CO: Which do you prefer making, records or playing live?
WAYNE: I really like making records. I like the idea of creating than touting it. The real reasons I like doing it, I like making it more than hyping it, but I can see why we need both. I see myself as a cook. I like to cook, but I want to serve people. I would feel bad if I cooked something and no one ate it. So, I need to create something and serve it to a hungry crowd.
