Concert review: The Flaming Lips
SINGAPORE — Thirty years on, The Flaming Lips remain a top concert draw without having to rely purely on past musical glories or on diehard fans who are as old as they are.
SINGAPORE — Thirty years on, The Flaming Lips remain a top concert draw without having to rely purely on past musical glories or on diehard fans who are as old as they are.
At their recent Monday night concert at The Coliseum, Hard Rock Hotel, Resort World Sentosa — their second visit to Singapore — the band drew an audience that stretched across demographics, and saw twenty-somethings grooving to the psychedelic rock strains together with their middle-aged compatriots. That’s no mean feat when you consider the Lips started out as a freaky offbeat psychedelic rock outfit in 1983 before morphing into a considerable musical force a decade later. By the turn of the new millennium, the band (Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd) had critics eating out of their hands, with Q magazine naming The Flaming Lips one of the “50 Bands To See Before You Die”.
All these plaudits still hold true in 2014— despite the combined age of band’s core members being 150 years! Basically, it is clear that Coyne and company are indeed young at heart with fun — with a capital “F” — a driving factor in their shows’ appeal. How else could one have interpreted the presence of a silver balloon sculpture of the phrase “F**K YEAH SINGAPORE” during perennial crowd-pleaser She Don’t Use Jelly? By then of course, the Coliseum had been uncharacteristically inundated with brightly coloured confetti and silver balloons, not to mention the obligatory lighting and LED video displays. Oh, and the giant costumed characters as well. It was a visual assault that had the crowd in raptures.
Music-wise, the Lips demonstrated that they were no slouches either. Although the set list concentrated a fair bit on the commercially and critically acclaimed The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, the band refused to go through the motions. Songs like Yoshimi Battles The Giant Robots Pt 1, Race For The Prize, In The Morning Of The Magicians and A Spoonful Weighs A Ton were delightfully and delicately rearranged to provide fans with right amounts of the familiar and the strange. These tracks surely satisfied even the casual Lips enthusiast without much difficulty.
The subsequent albums — War With The Mystics, Embroynic and The Terror — were also sampled at certain moments for maximum effect, with the incandescent Vein Of Stars a memorable highlight. In between, Coyne had his trademarked plastic bubble jaunt into the masses, which was as trippy and surreal as one could imagine.
Naturally, the best was saved for the end. The wistful Do You Realize provided a poignant moment for the audience to share, its lyrics (“Do you realize / that happiness makes you cry / Do you realize / that everyone you know someday will die”) striking a chord with everyone.
Finally, The Flaming Lips delivered a wondrous tribute to their spiritual forebears — The Beatles — with a distinctive version of Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds that brought the house down in spectacular fashion. It did seem that just for that special moment, the ghost of John Lennon possessed Wayne Coyne for a spine-tingling experience. All told, it was a comprehensive sonic and visual experience that lived up to the hype.