Flaming Lips Live Brisbane 5/2/25: A Humanist Rapture

“Never heard of them,” my 19 year-old son said a few months ago when informed I had bought him a ticket to the Flaming Lips gig here in Brisbane. “It will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before,” was my promise to him. Admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar as he’s a painfully shy introvert whose only previous concert experience was the Jack White gig I dragged him along to a couple of months ago.

I fell for the Lips early, right from the first, delightful bars of ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ back in the early 90s. I’ve always been a sucker for bubblegum psychedelia. Like many, my eyebrows lifted skywards in 1999 when this ‘novelty’ group of weirdos released one of the best albums of the 90s, The Soft Bulletin. My eyebrows went into orbit when they then released Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in 2001, one of the greatest albums of that and any decade. It was one of those significant albums in my life, nursing me through some dark times. The follow-up ‘At War with the Mystics’ had some good stuff, but was definitely a few notches below. The following decade saw a retreat back into impenetrable psychedelia and an overwhelming number of releases, collaborations and concept albums (Check out Space Boots with Miley Cyrus. It’s genuinely great). I jumped off the bus somewhere around (scans CD shelves) Embryonic.

So back to Yoshimi, an amazing amalgam of Wayne Coyne’s fractured Neil Young-ish vocals, skewed sci-fi lyrics, Floydian space rock, and a frankly stunning drum’n’bass onslaught. This tour celebrates the 20th anniversary of the album, which nicely complements the only previous time I saw them, almost exactly 20 years ago when the album had just been released. The Lips lineup has changed since then, with bassist Michael Ivins leaving a few years ago. The heart of the band (during the era I like, anyway) has always been Coyne and musical polymath Steven Drozd and they remain in place. Drozd plays most instruments, including drums, on all their recordings and plays guitar and keyboards live. They are supplemented by an excellent new bassist, a guitarist/pedal steel guitarist and a drummer who does a laudable job of retaining the Drozd feel, a key part of the Lips sound.

Trying to describe the concert, as any who have seen them live will agree, is difficult. First set was the Yoshimi album in full, complete with 20-foot tall inflatable pink robots, cubic yards of exploding glitter, confetti missiles etc. And that was just the first song. Fronting it all was the immensely likeable Coyne, genuinely delighting in the crowd’s excitement, one of those great frontmen completely devoid of pretence. His voice, always the weakest thread in the live Lips, was great (Supplemented? Don’t know, don’t care) the drums and bass thunderous. The crowd was in raptures.

When they left the stage for the intermission, I turned around to my son and Lady Podicle. I genuinely had not taken my eyes off the stage before that. I saw that my son’s eyes were moist, and all he said was “I’m in awe”.

After a short break they stormed back on with ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, and everything, including the crowd somehow ramped up a further notch. They leant heavily on Soft Bulletin and Mystics for the second set, my only quibbles being that they didn’t play Buggin’ or Free Radicals (surely a song for the times). They could have also left out ‘Christmas at the Zoo’ and I don’t think anyone would have complained. Weaved through all of this were Coynes humanist interjections on pain, hurt and love. We also had inflatable rainbows, eyeballs, lips and yet more cubic yards of glitter and confetti. The cleaners earned their money that night.

They finished with ‘Race for the Prize’ the opening track from Soft Bulletin, then they were gone and a few thousand people emerged into the steamy Brisbane night, many of us healed, even if only for a few short hours.

A few other disjointed observations:
– I love the fact that they footed the cost to cart a bunch of giant props halfway around the world, many to be used for only one song in the set.
– The digital board behind the band displayed all the lyrics so the crowd could sing along. This theme of participation is obviously important to Coyne. He even stopped and restarted a song when it malfunctioned.
– He strongly encouraged the crowd to film/photo/record as much as they want. As he said, he’d want to show his grandkids the craziness of a Lips concert.
– Wayne Coyne has a huge delta between casual perceptions and the actuality of his persona, as anyone who has seen the Fearless Freaks documentary can attest. He isn’t some tortured, fragile hippy soul: he’s incredibly hard-working, driven and level-headed. In that documentary you could see the hours of work he put in before and after every gig, washing costumes, packing glitter balloons etc. He is typically on stage helping roadies before each gig. The only comparison I can think of for a driven, cohesive person with such a deeply oddball output would be Frank Zappa, however I find Coyne joyous and inclusive where Zappa was exclusive and pretentious.

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