Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne reveals all about ‘buffoon’ Donald Trump and working with ‘smart and crazy’ Miley Cyrus
The new album marks a return to the ethereal melodies of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
HE’S the 56-year-old leader of The Flaming Lips known for psychedelic rock odysseys, wild clouds of grey hair and dressing up in animal costumes.
Oh, and he won a Grammy for a song called The Wizard Turns On . . . The Giant Silver Flashlight And Puts On His Werewolf Moccasins.
She’s the 24-year-old elastic-tongued pop princess known for swinging naked on a wrecking ball and being Disney’s child star Hannah Montana.
However unlikely it seems, Wayne Coyne and Miley Cyrus have struck up a musical relationship that extends to stage and studio.
She contributed vocals to the Lips’ outlandish re-imagination of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (With A Little Help From My Fwends) while they helped her record the Miley Cyrus Her Dead Petz digital album before touring as her backing band.
This cross-generational love-in continues on the serene We A Famly, the final track on the Lips’ new long player, Oczy Mlody. More about the strange title in Polish later.
“You and me, we a famly,” repeat Wayne and Miley in perfect harmony as the song fades to close.
When I meet Coyne at his favourite London hotel tucked away in the heart of Clerkenwell, it’s clear his young collaborator has given him a powerful injection of joie de vivre and that she has become part of The Flaming Lips family.
He’s looking fit and well and wearing a tracksuit top covered in a crazy green, white and black pattern.
Between glugs of Americano, his words come tumbling out.
Like so many independent-minded American musicians, he’s not a massive fan of President-elect Donald Trump but his response to the election result is more measured than most.
“It’s exciting times!” he exclaims. “He’s a buffoon but hey I’m a buffoon. I don’t know what I’m doing either, you know what I mean? It’s like join the club!”
As someone who has spent most of his life in Oklahoma City, Coyne understands America’s Republican heartland. “Oklahoma is probably the most Republican of all the states. As the results come in, no one even bothers talking about it,” he sighs.
With the obligatory Trump comment out of the way, he explains the Cyrus connection.
“I mean even back when she was still thought of as Hannah Montana, we knew she’d made it public that she liked The Flaming Lips,” he says.
“She would talk about our album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and maybe she even did some covers from it.
“She’s just so smart, she really is. I mean she’s crazy as well. She really does love to sing and she loves to hear herself sing and she talks and talks. It’s amazing if you get her on a roll.
“When you’re there with Miley’s audience, they absolutely love her. They would tear her to bits and you forget that. She has that young, young audience who dress like her.”
Coyne believes coming from a musical family has given Miley broad taste and knowledge.
“Her dad Billy Ray Cyrus is a cool dude. I don’t know that much about his music but, if you’re around him, he’s a cool guy and she absolutely knows all music. She’s got it.
“She’ll pick any song just because she likes it so on that level, we have similar taste. Without that, we’d always be struggling.
“We also have a similar work ethic. I’m always the first to say, ‘Let’s go do this,’ and she’s the same. Together we get things done.”
Musicians are notorious for letting their egos get in the way of effective collaboration so I’m intrigued to find out if they ever clash.
Coyne replies: “No, but if we ever did, I would allow her to win because I’d be thinking, ‘This is going to be cool’.”
His friendship with Miley extends beyond music, including down-to-earth visits to pet shops and sharing the odd spliff.
“With her, you’d think there would be 20 assistants and limousines waiting but it’s nothing like that.
“We’d forget she’s a big star. We would go to the pet store together, just her, Katy (Coyne’s 20-something girlfriend) and I.
“One day, Miley was going to PetSmart in Los Angeles to buy a turtle and pick up some food for her 17 dogs and her pigs.
“Suddenly, there were all these people around us but she had some pictures taken, kept shopping and gave people a sense of just getting on with her thing without it having to be a ‘f*** you’.”
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Coyne talks openly about Miley’s penchant for marijuana and his own bad experiences with the drug. “I don’t know if you’re like that but she can smoke powerful, powerful weed 24 hours a day.
“I guess some people can compartmentalise it in a way that helps them, whereas with me and a lot of people I know, weed is a devastating attack on your ability to use your f***ing brain."
Weed makes me freak out. I start thinking the cops are coming or the house is going to burn down
Wayne Coyne
“Once in a while, it works the other way. Probably only three times in my whole life has it done the thing which makes me understand why people like it.
“It usually makes me freak out, like everything’s going badly. I start thinking the cops are coming or we’re going to be in a motorcycle accident or the house is going to burn down.
“The only way I can get out of it is by going to sleep. I’ve tried to get drunk, I’ve tried cocaine, I’ve tried everything to get out of that lock.
“I think that’s the difference between the way Miley gets stoned and the way I get stoned. I just get scared.”
So are The Flaming Lips getting new fans from the Miley Cyrus audience?
“I don’t think they give a s**t but as some of them get older and listen to music, they make that connection with us and think, ‘This is cool’.”
The new album marks a return to the ethereal melodies that made 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and 2002’s Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots such spectacular, life-affirming triumphs and is in sharp contrast to its dense and disturbing predecessor, 2013’s The Terror.
As ever, Coyne combines life’s greatest themes — love, loss and mortality — with an almost childlike sense of both wonder and dread.
The fact we kept going is just dumb luck. When we hear out old stuff, we always love it
Wayne Coyne
It explains elaborate song titles that evoke unwritten fairytales such as There Should Be Unicorns, One Night While Hunting For Faeries And Witches And Wizards To Kill and Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes.
Coyne describes the album’s setting as “an accidental other world. The song The Castle was a breakthrough in our attempts to mix fantasy with reality.
“If you’d told me two years ago that we’d be singing about unicorns, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
He says the concept reminds him of the perfect song about growing up, Puff The Magic Dragon. “That song is so sad I can hardly bear to talk about it,” he says.
“When I was hearing it as an eight-year-old, it wasn’t a coming of age song to me, just a real sad story about a dragon being forgotten.
“I didn’t want to grow up and leave the dragon behind . . . and I guess I still haven’t. It had that quality of evoking a different landscape with a different world.”
Key to the ongoing success of the Lips and their search for sonic enlightenment is Coyne’s enduring, occasionally rocky working relationship with multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd.
“It’s intense,” he says. “We talk about music all the time. I’m good at writing about 60 per cent of the songs and he’s really great at writing about 40 per cent.”
For Coyne, his work is all about having sparring partners, whether it’s Drozd or Cyrus, and he doesn’t think he’d make a good solo artist.
“I think it’s just my personality,” he admits. “I’m from a big family and The Flaming Lips is like a family to me.
“We just keep fighting and trying. Now that some of the guys have kids and other commitments, they’re more comfortable with like an a**hole authoritative leader.”
Coyne makes no secret of his admiration for rapper A$AP Rocky and his imaginative electronic soundscapes, an influence that percolates through Oczy Mlody.
“Being around Miley, you get exposed to so much music you wouldn’t stumble upon on your own, particularly a lot of the rap stuff.”
This brings us on to the album title, Oczy Mlody, which means “eyes of the young” in Polish.
It is also the name of the woozy instrumental opening track.
Coyne found the expression in an old Polish book called Blisko Domu, a name he reserved for another song later in the album.
“I bought it in a second-hand bookshop for two dollars because I liked the way it looked,” he reveals.
“Then it was lying around in the studio and the idea of words that are slightly gibberish unless you’re Polish appealed to me.
"As for the expression ‘Oczy Mlody’, Steven and I both thought it sounded like a drug, another little vehicle for letting you travel to a new world.”
It’s clear from talking to Coyne that his passion for music remains undimmed through the passing decades.
He says: “I’ve been in The Flaming Lips since I was 21 and even before then I was putting together my own group.
“I thought I’d do it for a couple of years to see what would happen and here I am.
“The fact that we kept going is just dumb luck, it really is. When we hear our old stuff, we always love it. My reaction is usually, ‘F***, that’s crazy!’”
In 2017, Wayne’s world is wacky and wonderful and, with a little help from his friend Miley, reaching whole new universes.
FLAMING LIPS Oczy Mlody
TRACKLIST
1. Oczy Mlody 2. How?? 3. There Should Be Unicorns 4. Sunrise (Eyes Of The Young) 5. Nigdy Nie (Never No) 6. Galaxy I Sink 7. One Night While Hunting For Faeries And Witches And Wizards To Kill 8. Do Glowy 9. Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes 10. The Castle 11. Almost Home (Blisko Domu) 12. We A Famly