When he was 16, Wayne Coyne got a job at a Long John Silver’s fast-food joint in his hometown of Oklahoma City. About a year later, three men with guns burst into the restaurant and ordered him and the staff to lie on the floor. Coyne found himself with a gun pointed at his head. The men were yelling at him and his co-workers, telling them they were going to kill them unless they could get into the locked safe. As Coyne lay there on the cold floor, he assumed he was going to die.
“I obviously didn’t die,” Coyne says. “But it did something to me. For the next six months or so it made me kind of like a Superman. The little insecurities you have and all these little doubts and all these things that stop you from telling people that you love them, or stop you from pursuing being a creative person, or whatever? Those just evaporated. And I was like, ‘F--- it, I’m going to say the things I want to say and do the things that I want to do.’
“I didn’t realise it was life-changing at the time, but as my life went on, I saw that being so young and having that jumpstart on not giving a f--- really helped me. I wouldn’t recommend anybody having to go through what I did, but it showed me what was important in my life.”
Coyne stayed true to that decision he made when he was a teenager. Now 63, he still lives in Oklahoma City and is speaking from the studio at the back of his house. More than four decades ago, he formed The Flaming Lips and embarked on a dizzying journey of wild experimentation and crazy schemes, combining alternative rock, psychedelia, electronics, symphonics and singalong melodies, creating one of the most joyous live experiences in modern rock.
A traumatic experience in his teens taught Wayne Coyne ″what was important in my life″.
Along the way Coyne became something like a musical Kurt Vonnegut, fusing the fantastical and the deeply humanist. In his late 50s he embarked on another journey by becoming a father for the first time. He now has two sons, Bloom and Rex, with his wife Katy, who he married in 2012.
“Having kids is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he says. “I know everyone says that, but it’s true. My theory is that if you give them absolutely all your love and all of your attention, somehow their energy gets thrown back into you, but only if you give everything.”
Coyne is renowned for his relentlessly upbeat nature, but we’re speaking just nine days after Donald Trump was elected US president for the second time. Doesn’t that make him feel less optimistic and hopeful about the world, and particularly his country?
“To think that something like Trump would take our optimism away, that’s giving him too much power,” he says. “I’d never do that. I’ve never waited for someone to be elected before I decided I’m going to live life the way I think is right. Presidents come and go, but music really can be with you forever.
“A friend of ours, Nell Smith, died in a car wreck a couple of weeks ago. When things like that happen you really don’t think about who’s president. Life is bigger than that. I mean, I wish Trump had lost, but it is what it is.”
‘Presidents come and go, but music really can be with you forever.’
Wayne Coyne
The band had taken 17-year-old Smith under their wing when she was a kid – she and her father were big fans – and recorded an entire album of Nick Cave songs with her, released in 2021 as Where The Viaduct Looms. In a cruel piece of serendipity, on the weekend she died, band member Steve Drozd’s 16-year-old daughter went missing in Seattle. She was found safe three days later.
One couldn’t blame Coyne for curling into a ball and telling the world to go to hell and leave him alone for a while, “but I never curse the universe and say, ‘Why is this happening?’ My wife and I talk about this all the time, how terrible times bring out the best in people. You’re never glad these things happen, but it makes everyone listen and help and rise to the occasion.”
That attitude is reflected in many of his songs, particularly those from the band’s most popular album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots from 2002. When the ongoing tour for the 20th anniversary comes to Australia early next year, they will perform the album in its entirety, then play other songs from their catalogue.
Coyne on stage with The Flaming Lips, whose concerts are known for their bouyant mood.
The record’s centrepiece is Do You Realize??, a swooning song that’s equal parts melancholic and uplifting, as Coyne sings in his typically high Neil Young-like register, “Do you realise everyone you know someday will die?” before reassuring us with the line: “The sun doesn’t go down, it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.”
Coyne thought Realize was just another of the many songs that seemed to pour out of him at the time – he has often claimed that it didn’t even feel like he was consciously writing them, but grabbing them out of the air. Countless fans have told him over the past two decades that they have played the song at their wedding, or at the funeral of a parent, spouse or child. He often looks out into an audience when he sings it and sees people crying.
The Flaming Lips live experience can do that to a person: there are moments of high emotion, moments of communal joy and moments of just plain weirdness. Onstage, Coyne is part-Willie Wonka, part-Barnum & Bailey ringmaster, with his wild mane of grey-streaked curls, his three-piece suits and his revivalist-meeting exhortations. There are confetti cannons, audience members onstage in animal costumes, a pair of huge rubber hands Coyne puts on at one point, and, his piece de resistance, a gigantic transparent plastic ball he enters at the beginning of concerts, often rolling over the upturned hands of the audience.
Coyne during The Flaming Lips’ show at the Sydney Opera House in 2019.Credit: Prudence Upton
“I look at it from the audience’s point of view, and it’s absurd and crazy and kind of cool,” he says. “And it’s definitely a gimmick. I mean, I love Bob Dylan, but I also really love Kiss. I love the idea that they go out there in those costumes and breathe fire.”
At 63, Coyne appears to be upholding the promise he made to himself all those years ago, lying on the floor of Long John Silver’s thinking he was about to die. He has lived a life less ordinary and played by his own rules. But does he envisage a time when he might tone things down, pack away the props, and just stand on stage and sing his songs?
“No, I think we want it to be spectacular,” he says. “We like it to be bigger, crazier, more exciting, more fun, and I don’t see us playing shows if we aren’t able to do it our way. I look out into our audiences and there’s all this joy and enthusiasm coming from them. And that’s like a drug.”
The Flaming Lips play Festival Hall, Melbourne, on Feb 1, Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, on Feb 2 and Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, on Feb 5.