The Flaming Lips

Wayne Coyne on how TFL navigated their way through C-19.

Were you able to draw any positives from lockdown?

I feel slightly bad talking about it, because for so many people it was horrible. I was scared that the virus might affect my little boy, who had just been born. At first I was glad to be home for a couple of weeks; nobody knew it would be more than a year. It felt amazing. I accomplished a lot of things, like gardening that I’d never do.

Back in January The Flaming Lips played two gigs in Oklahoma with band and its audience encased in a hundred bubbles, each holding up to three audience members.

Back in 2019 I had done a drawing of the Flaming

Lips playing a concert and put it on Instagram, except I was the only one in a space bubble. It was a joke. But we started to take the idea of doing it more seriously.

Where did you get the space bubbles?

On ebay! We scoured around and got six or seven, and then we put together a staged video of us playing a concert in a space bubble. We didn’t think much more about it. But eventually we reached the conclusion that we could do it.

Suddenly the joke got serious.

Yeah. We were very cautious in case something went wrong, and the further we proceeded it became more and more scary. When we did the very first concert, the coronavirus had just peaked. It was terrifying; nobody knew if it would be this way for a year or even another five years. Our main focus was: how do we get these people into these space bubbles and keep them safe? Will they be able to breathe? How do they get to use the bathroom? All of those details. The second part was: can we actually play in the bubbles?

But all along there was a big audience telling us: you’ve got to do this Wayne, we will be there. In the end we did ten sold-out concerts.

How did you establish whether playing inside the bubbles was physically possible?

We built a replica of a stage in the warehouse that we use for band practice. Each band member would go from their car to a bubble – inside the warehouse. And it seemed to work. We got very used to playing within these bubbles because there was no alternative. Even so, the very first show was extremely scary. It had felt like do or die, but the response was overwhelming.

You predicted it would be “safer than going to the grocery store”. Did it live up to that billing? Absolutely. But that’s not saying the grocery stores weren’t trying very hard themselves. Here in Oklahoma it’s a very Republican place and people were standing next to one another. There were deaths every day. All of us [those at the shows] believed that this thing was real. Nobody was taking their masks off. Everybody that came wanted to participate in the safeties that had been put in place.

You told Rolling Stone: “I think it’s a bit of a new normal”. Will we get back to the ‘old’ normal?

I really don’t know. Should we all wear masks from now on, even if there isn’t a pandemic? Let’s try thinking a little bit more about how much my breath could affect your family. It’s possible that the world will be this way now. There are all types of viruses and they mutate. The positive is that we’ve been through all of this now, so if it happens again I feel like we could do it all over. That could serve us well.

The Flaming Lips have a rescheduled run of five UK dates for May 2022. Are you optimistic that they will take place?

Yeah, I am. We’re playing shows here in America at the end of this summer, and it looks like they are on track. So… by next May? I’d like think so. Unless,

God forbid, there’s something even more unexpected waiting out there for us.

And you’ll play with no bubbles required?

Ha ha! That’s not something we want to be carrying forward. Can you imagine being at Glastonbury with all of the audience in space bubbles?

What should we learn from the pandemic?

Let’s take care of our teachers, our hospitals and our medical staff. The concert industry has been running for decades and it’s a well-oiled, smart machine. I hope that in twenty-five years we can say the same thing of the infrastructures that have taken such a terrible beating from this thing.