The Flaming Lips.
I bought ‘The Soft Bulletin’ and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ in 2003 (I must look for the receipt actually.) They didn’t click with me and the line in ‘Do You Realize??’ that went ‘Do you realise/That everyone you know, someday, will die’ freaked me the fuck out so I stopped listening to the band for years,
That all changed in 2006. That June they were supporting Bob Dylan in Kilkenny and seeing as I was going to the gig, I pulled out the albums again. I enjoyed them and was excited about them playing, more so than I was about the other support band, some guys I’d never heard of called the Violent Femmes.
I’m not joking, that gig changed my fucking life. Violent Femmes were excellent and the instant the Flaming Lips came on I knew I had a new favourite band. Everything they did was brilliant, all the gimmicks like the confetti and the hamster balls. I was enthralled. I didn’t know you could have FUN in music. I was coming out of a serious thrash metal and singer-songwriter phase and was a sullen teenager. This gig changed everything. Bob came on afterwards and was lacklustre by comparison.
I went home and that night went on to The Flaming Lips website, looking for more information. On there was a web player with thirteen or fourteen of songs from their previous albums. I left it play in reverse chronological order and sat through the songs from the albums I knew before getting to ‘Bad Days’, which I recognised from the ‘Batman Forever’ soundtrack of all places. This was a bit different! Electric guitars! Was this a totally different band? I kept listening and in the next half hour heard ‘The Abandoned Hospital Ship’, ‘Turn It On’, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, ‘Hallowe’en At The Barbary Coast’ and, lastly, ‘Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues (Everyone Wants to Live Forever)’. That song blew me away! The bass! The pitched down vocals! The lyrics! I was hooked!
[Intermission as the song plays.]
I spent the next few months obsessively hunting down their albums. I ordered the classic mid 90s albums on Amazon, counting down the days before they arrived in Ireland. I listened to them non stop for months. I went to a party thrown by a friend where his older brother had left his CDs out. One of them was ‘The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg’, supposedly a Flaming Lips compilation. I threw it on and heard this unearthly noise rock. By the time it got to ‘Five Stop Mother Superior Rain’ I knew I needed it. I went to Cork that weekend, a two and a half hour bus journey, just to look for it. Plugd Records had the compilation and also had a vinyl copy of ‘Telepathic Surgery’. I bought that too. A few weeks later I got a call saying that the shop had ‘In A Priest Driven Ambulance’ in as a reissue. I got the bus back down to buy it.
I spent the next year obsessively listening to them. I brought my little brothers to see them play a two hour set in the Marquee in Cork. I listened to the first side of ‘In A Priest Driven Ambulance’ every night before going to work in a shit nightclub. I found out that they had a forum and started downloading individual live tracks. I made mp3 CD compilations of live songs from every era, listening to them for hours each day while selling strawberries at the side of the road. Soon after that, full live shows started appearing online. We had just gotten broadband and I started downloading everything. I found some of my favourite recordings ever, renditions that blew the album versions away, like this recording of ‘The Abandoned Hospital Ship’, one of my favourite pieces of music ever.
[Intermission as the song plays.]
I’m now 29 years old, I’ve seen the band eight times and I own every album on vinyl and CD, even ‘Zaireeka’. I’ve sang the songs live with a load of different bands. I’ve become best friends with fellow fans, starting bands with them as well. I picked up a bass and listened to Michael Ivins’ basslines obsessively, started playing guitar and learned the songs as well. I could probably sing the lyrics to every song they released from 1990 until 2014. I soundtrack every Christmas with the ‘Christmas On Mars’ OST. My iPod is filled with their live recordings (see below). I still absolutely love them. The lyrics, the musicianship, the variety of sounds, the risks they took. I love it all.
