On the bubble
In response to COVID, Flaming Lips on the verge of playing ` the World's First Space Bubble Concerts' in OKC
From California's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival to various Oklahoma City stages for hometown New Year's Eve extravaganzas and even on an alien planet in his movie “Christmas on Mars,” Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has spent a not-insignificant portion of his career in a literal bubble.
It's become a signature spectacle at the Grammywinning band's famously spectacular concerts: The singer-songwriter rolling through cheering crowds in a giant clear “Space Bubble.”
Nowadays, though, he isn't the only one experiencing the show from the inside of a human hamster ball. The Oklahoma City-based entertainer, his fellow Lips and their entire audience will be ensconced in inflatable orbs at two sold-out hometown shows Friday and Saturday at The Criterion.
“I don't think anybody could
have predicted or looked ahead and thought this would really happen,” Coyne told The Oklahoman in a 2020 phone interview. “It is strange. We are living in strange, strange times.”
Billed as “the World's First Space Bubble Concerts,” the shows — which have received worldwide media attention — reflect the added significance Coyne's plastic protective sphere has gained due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Almost prophetic
Coyne was actually in one of his bubbles filming the music video for the Lips' haunting song “Flowers of Neptune 6” on March 11, the day the pandemic turned American life upside, starting right in Oklahoma City.
“We shot some of that the night of the Thunder game here in town. So, we were shooting this stuff, and we get in the car later that night and we've heard the news about the Thunder game (being canceled) and Tom Hanks (being diagnosed with COVID-19). And the next thing everything is shut down,” Coyne recalled.
The images of the video now seem almost eerily prophetic: Coyne enveloped in his bubble and draped in an American flag, a solitary figure strolling and singing across an Oklahoma field set aflame. With the pandemic, social distancing and seclusion became the new realities, and the typical American way of life — including the live music business — suddenly went up in smoke.
“Up until then, it was very vague ... and it seemed like within an hour or two, it switched. So, we're making this first video still in the other world, and then it comes out in the world that we have now. So, some of it, you just get kind of lucky that what you're doing seems to be speaking of the times that you're in,” Coyne said.
Bubbling idea
The pandemic was still in its early days when the producers of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” invited the Lips to do a remote performance on the program.
“We were talking about us doing a song, and then I said, `But I want to do a show like this, where everybody is in a Space Bubble.' And they said ... `We want you to as well.' So, they helped us get all the Space Bubbles, because even though we're The Flaming Lips and we have some, we didn't have that many. So, in that performance, I think there's 26 of them that you can see, and they came from China. And at the very beginning of this, nothing was coming from China,” Coyne said.
“Part of our thinking was this could all be over by the time we get the Space Bubbles here to do the performance. ... Of course, it's all still happening, but when it was happening, there'd been no way we could have thought, `Oh, this is the way it's going to be.' You're just doing whatever that moment feels like you should do.”
Signature look
For the Colbert spot, which aired in June, the Lips staged a small Oklahoma City performance that featured all the band members and everyone in the audience — including Coyne's wife and son and OKC Mayor David Holt — in inflatable orbs as the art-rockers played their iconic song “Race for the Prize.”
Once the Lips debuted the bubble concert concept on the CBS late show, it became the signature visual to accompany their 21st studio album, “American Head.” After its initial release date was delayed from spring, the acclaimed album bowed in September, and the Lips celebrated by performing their song “God and the Policeman” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and a set on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, both in the bubbly new configuration.
In October, the art-rockers played a bigger version of the distinctively socially distanced performance at The Criterion, where band and audience members alike were encased in spheres. The test concert — featured in the music videos for “Assassins of Youth” and “Brother Eye” — went viral, creating headlines for media outlets around the globe and leading to the announcement of “the world's first actual Space Bubble live concert.”
After the concert sold out in minutes, the Lips added a second hometown show at The Criterion. Although COVID19 protocols — including required masks — will be strictly observed, the 75-minute shows are being billed as full-production live Lips extravaganzas.
Each bubble can accommodate as many as three people and zips on the inside, helpers will be in the audience to assist fans, and the orbs will be cleaned with sanitizing fog.
The bubble concerts were initially booked for December and postponed to this weekend due to rising COVID-19 numbers. With his years of experience, though, Coyne is so confident in space bubbles' protective capabilities that he even loaned Santa Claus an inflatable orb so that St. Nick could spread Christmas cheer to patients at The Children's Hospital at OU Medicine.
“It does prevent that thing where people start to get drunk and the music is loud and they start screaming into each other's face, which is the way that the COVID-19 is most spread. ... Not screaming bad, but that's just how conversations are when you're at big gatherings,” Coyne said. “You can be in a Space Bubble with your friends that came to the show with you who you've been with your whole time and you know aren't sick.”