Flaming Lips talk about touring with Coldplay

Flavorwire recently caught up with the Flaming Lips’ vocalist and master of ceremonies, Wayne Coyne, who amongst other things talked about touring with Coldplay.

The punk-rock born, experimentally-evolved band The Flaming Lips have created a new pinnacle in their psychedelic rock endeavors this week with the release of their twelfth studio album Embryonic. With a strong cult following after albums such as The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the hard-core followers (not me, by the way) felt the band was on a course for pop-alternative sounds and a routine stage performance with their 2006 release of At War with the Mystics...

However, those assumptions have been turned upside down with the most experimental release by the "fearless freaks" since their four-disk Zaireeka album which was meant to be played on four stereos simultaneously.

Flaming Lips on touring with Coldplay:

Flavorwire: You seem to have a special relationship with the audience, and it is a collaborative effort when you perform. You can’t imagine yourself just getting up onstage and singing your songs, right?

Wayne Coyne: You know, we played some shows opening up for Coldplay. They were these giant stadium shows in Paris and Barcelona and around Europe and stuff. And you’d think that if you were playing to 60,000 people, they’re bound to respond. Well, they don’t at all. And we kind of knew that. We’ve opened up for big groups before, and these things that our audience is ready to do, these other audiences don’t know what it is. And we would go up in front of the Coldplay audience and we would just simply play. But we do that often enough that we know it still has to be a performance. It still has to be about music. It still has to be about something other than this familiarity that our audience has with our personas and stuff. Actually, I kind of like it. Me and the fellas all sort of remarked after those Coldplay shows of how you really do play for yourselves sometimes. We’re playing sometimes just to interact with each other up there.

Discuss the full article at the World Of Music forum here in the Flaming Lips thread.