The Flaming Lips
Westville Music Bowl
New Haven
Aug. 8, 2025
There are certain truths that are timeless, eternal, forever.
One of them is that, to quote the great magazine journalist Tom Junod, “Wayne Coyne manages to look more absurd in a dapper linen-colored suit than Steven and Michael do in costumes that are essentially footed pajamas.”
Junod wrote those words about the Flaming Lips front man back in 2007, and while a great deal has changed — Michael Ivins is no longer with the band, for example — it remains true that Coyne’s suits are somehow more absurd than what surrounds him onstage, which can best be summed up by noting that at one point Coyne had as many giant inflatable pink robots for company onstage as he did bandmates.
A Flaming Lips show, as I was reminded Friday night at Westville Music Bowl, where the temperature was as cool as the hip parents slapping air-tarmac headphones on their toddlers, is one part music, two parts spectacle.
Or maybe it’s three parts music, five parts spectacle.
Or maybe parents shouldn’t bring along children too young to walk, headphones or no. I know that babysitting has gotten expensive — just ask my teenage daughters, who have better cash flow than I do — but really, Young Couple in Sleeve Tattoos, could you find nobody to watch little Mykenzie and Aidan? Or did you just want to tell them that their first concert featured giant inflatable pink robots?
When I say that the Flaming Lips are brilliantly frivolous, I don’t mean that as an insult.
For one thing, the Day-Glo light show, the confetti cannons, and the courtesy balloons that roadies throw into the audience for our pleasure are, well, pleasurable: there was more bang for your buck at the Lips show than at the Willie Nelson/Bob Dylan/Lucinda Williams/Wilco show I saw a week earlier, and that would be true even if I hadn’t gotten free tickets to the Lips and even if Lucinda hadn’t decided to skip “Side of the Road” and “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” which would be like the Lips skipping “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which you may remember as the song about Vaseline (not to be confused with Bush’s “Glycerine,” the other mid-’90s song about a lubricant).
But that’s the thing: the Lips did play “She Don’t Use Jelly,” because of course they did. Because they are the band that comes to party. In a tightly choreographed (by which I mean none of the inflatables malfunctioned) two-hour set, featuring music from the early days out of Oklahoma City through 2006’s album At War with the Mystics, leaning heavily on 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Lips showed once again why they are one of America’s top party bands.
By “party band,” I don’t mean the horn-driven swagger of the Asbury Jukes — I don’t mean bar band. Nor do I mean that their songs are about liking to par-TAY (much as I like to par-TAY; who doesn’t, really?). Nor do I mean that they will show up at your party and play a cover of “Wonderwall” for beer.
No, what I mean is that being with the Flaming Lips makes you feel like you are at a good party. Wherever they are, as Mike Damone said, that’s the place to be. And they’ve held this vibe through the decades, even as Coyne is the last remaining original member of the band, which raises the philosophical question known as the Ship of Theseus Paradox—or, in pop music circles, as the Temptations Paradox: “If you replace every member of a band, one at a time, with somebody new, when all the members have been replaced, do you still have the original band? And if not, when did it cease to be?”
To be fair, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd joined early, so he must share responsibility for what thousands of us did Saturday night, which is sing along to a band that, with little radio play, has become one of the defining indie bands of the quarter-century not with any of the usual indie mojo — the Brit-sneer of Oasis, the hyper-literacy of R.E.M. and all its imitators, or the mope of the Shins — but by camouflaging its novelty-song heart in a cloak of avant-garde stage props and futuristic lights. As with Talking Heads, the songs are great, but really the band wants to dress up and have fun.
And by party band, I also mean that the Lips treat life, onstage and off, as a never-ending party. This is a band that has had the good taste to borrow heavily — some said plagiarize—from Cat Stevens (compare “Fight Test” to “Father and Son”) and to drop in for a guest appearance at the Peach Pit on Beverly Hills 90210. Color Me Badd may have played the Peach Pit, but what British folkie did they lift from?
Wayne Coyne isn’t much for banter. His main intercourse with the audience involved saying, whenever the “whoo”s and applause died down, “Keep it going! Keep it going!,” which he said while flapping his arms like a hype man of old. But near the end of Friday’s show, just before launching into a cover of the anti-war anthem “War Pigs” in honor of fallen comrade Ozzy Osbourne, Coyne cautioned that music can’t actually stop wars: “Music in and of itself is just too much fun” to do that work, he said, to much applause. It’s a message artists need to hear, and preach, more: in a world turned upside down (and half the world always is, from where any of us stands), dancing with pink robot flamingos while forgetting our mortality as dusk leads into night by West Rock is an important act, as important as marching or picketing or land-acknowledging. The fun is the message, while we still have time. After all, as the Lips sang to us:
Do you realize
That you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize
We’re floating in space?
Do you realize
That happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize
That everyone you know someday will die?
