The Flaming Lips: A weird-ass story of self-discovery

One night, while working at a fast-food outlet called Long John Silver’s, Wayne Coyne was held up at gunpoint.

A spate of armed robberies in Oklahoma City had left several restaurant employees dead and now Wayne found himself face-down on the floor, thinking: ‘Is this it?’

“It was such a horrible thing that when I didn’t get killed, I felt like nothing could hurt me,” he says.

“After that happened I thought, ‘This matters. I’m going to do it because what do I have to lose?’” The ‘it’ was music. Wayne dreamed of being an artist but, in reality, he was a 16-year-old dropout frying fish in a costume.

The path to success would take longer than imagined – another six years before forming psych-rock weirdos The Flaming Lips in 1983, and another seven after that before quitting Long John Silver’s – but Wayne’s creativity had been catalysed.

His skills as an entertainer… not so much. That would come around the year 2000, when the band transitioned from aloof introverts to the most absurd live spectacle on the planet.

There would be dancing Santas and confetti cannons, exploding heads and giant hands shooting lasers, megaphone cheerleading and a crowd-surfing space bubble – all of it symbolising The Flaming Lips’ anarchic inspiration.

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