“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 » Continue Reading.