By Saturday night I’m beginning to feel the burn: overpriced food, cider in the sun; the hell booths that are the portaloos...the sun is slowly going down as the flaming lips bound on stage amid a kaleidoscope of light and colour; animal costumes, inflatable sunshine and gargantuan balloons. Steven Drozd launches into Race For The Prize - a soaring, fuzzy guitar riff, the polar bears, ducks, dolphins, pandas, tigers spin and jig, Wayne Coyne grabs an electric lantern and whirls it around his head by the extension cord in four-odd minutes of bleary eyed joy...I begin to feel a lot better.
They play maybe seven or eight songs in over an hour-there’s birthday wishes, exploding weather balloons, puppets, paper mache fist, fake blood, the songs themselves materializing sporadically like some kind of drunken carnival sing along. The Lips are the musical equivalent of a sad smile. As the giant balloons bounce serenely across the sea of people and the beasts dance, Coyne gives us a few from the back catalogue – including ‘Race For The Prize’ and ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ - and quite a bit of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots – ‘Fight Test’, ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots pt.1’, ‘Do You Realize??’ - it's record that shimmers with death, loneliness regret and resigned happiness, swirling synth and strummed twelve strings. For me, the finest example of this was 'Do You Realise??' – A beautiful, uplifting song, chiming guitars, the giant screen behind the band showing a flashing disco ball and a topless woman practicing kung-fu. And when he sings "do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?" The knowledge is far from horrible.
But it was all about the stage show. After Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots pt.1, Coyne puts on a nun glove puppet, points it at the camera mounted on the microphone that relays back to the giant screen and leads the crowd in a reprise, the nun gurning and yelling. The power of the audience, he says, will grow and explode and reach everybody in Glastonbury, in the world, in the cosmos; all the other bands will stop playing in the face of such monumental good vibes. That was the plan and I think he’s a little disappointed when all he gets is a mumbled mash up of screaming. During ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ Coyne attaches a huge orange balloon to some sort of industrial leaf blower and turns it on. The band hammer at their instruments, a crescendo, and it explodes over his head, splattering the drum kit in thick strips of rubber.
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It was a little girl’s 5th birthday too...and an 18th for a girl with the improbable name of Nessie. Coyne tries to rouse up a 100,000 strong chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’, but not before dumping a load of fake blood over himself, stating, “Birth is the bloodiest thing most of us will ever go though.” True enough I guess, but he takes a good ten minutes trying to drag words out of people’s throats when a lot of them were probably just wanting some more songs to try and soothe the tender skin and beating sun headaches. Me though, I enjoyed it. The Flaming Lips danced the fine line between party fun and tedium but it was just so cool to see a stage full of day-glow mammals and swirling lights. The music itself, what there was of it, vibrated with an otherworldly, childlike delight at the fundamentals in life: We’re all doomed, but let’s dress up like yetis while we still have air in out lungs. And why not?
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