Gig Review: The Flaming Lips At Somerset House
An evening of confetti, grief and joy proves that no band captures the beautiful absurdity of being alive quite like The Flaming Lips.
London was in a chatty mood this late July. Weeks without rain and a criminal lack of air conditioning in this godforsaken place has melted its inhabitants' edges. The city has gone soft. No one seems to give a collective fuck any more; people were… nice (okay, nice by London’s standards). You get gooey faster in the sun.
Saturday started us in the East. Shoreditch. Jaguar Shoes, if we're really dropping the pin. East London Block Party, our partners for the evening, is the kind of place you go to discover the bands you'll later claim you saw before everyone else caught on. We teamed up with ELB and Jaguar Shoes to bring you a bill of Bone China's lo-fi indie rock, Cracked Lime's wiry post-punk, MM'99's hazy hyperpop (including that Video Games cover), Huarinami's groove-soaked psychedelia, Silverwingkiller's glorious rawness, and Lover DJ closing out the night. You saw them all first, remember. Full review incoming if you don’t.
But this is a Flaming Lips review - all four readers of this article I hear you cry - That’s all you do for Still Listening Jules! Trot across the globe following Wayne Conye and his troupe. Yes, I am in the cult it seems.
We will get to the FL show later…
In typical Still Listening fashion, once parked up at the event, we usually sit outside acclimatising. I usually smoke too much and hydrate poorly. Masking my insecurities. A short supply of filters in the area had our table doubling as a revolving door of hand outs of sticks of white sponges. Conversations came and went, one with a new friend continued on for longer.
After flipping a Coyne (sorry) twice, a new plan was hatched. All three musketeers would board the 26 and the red metal box took us to our next adventure. Extra ticket blagged we trace Somerset House’s neoclassical corners for the entrance.
It appeared some kind of ASOS Eyes Wide Shut event was happening on the cobbled grounds on the exterior on the Thames side. Although offended by the “Why’s everyone in ball gowns!?” Question, these attendees seemed alright in their uptightness as we breezed through them.
A marble corridor cleanses our palate calmly separating the two worlds.
We turn the corner of the courtyard drenched in the early night black. Giant balloons already released above excited hands. Lasers dart out towards the parameters of the courtyard. The sound drenches us as we run in. We are late but we are here. ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ is first for us (yes we were that late - blame TFL).
A deeper cut follows, ‘Five Stop Mother Superior Rain,’ from The Flaming Lips’ fourth studio album In a Priest Driven Ambulance (With Silver Sunshine Stares) released in the early 90s.
A new, unreleased song (‘Every Teardrop Cried’) follows. Coyne, now being ferried across the stage atop an inflatable alien, introduces it. He talks about loss, and beauty. How when someone you love is no longer here physically, their love doesn't disappear with them. It buries itself somewhere deep inside you. The searching, the suffering, the madness of looking for someone who isn't there anymore, it has to become something. If you're lucky, it manifests itself as beauty. “That's them,” he says. That's what beauty in the world is.
His voice wavers as he speaks about the loss of his oldest brother just eleven days before tonight's show. The "original Fearless Freak," whose photograph appears on the cover of 2020's American Head. A man next to me quietly removes his hat and holds it to his heart. “We love yous” are called into the open sky. A collective remembrance of our own losses, our own miss yous.
‘Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung,' rolls through next as Coyne lassos a light with full power as if to keep the energy pure. The light swells around with the steel pedal outro and eerie cries that close. The trumpet blares for ‘It’s Summertime,’ everybody sways.
The ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ is glorious in all its overstimulating chaos. An older couple overtake us, the lady excited to get a good shot on her phone. The corners of the man’s mouth turn upwards as we blast through the song. There’s a good group of us wailing ‘With all your powerrrr,’ the ridiculousness in full effect.
One final surprise comes in the shape of Black Sabbath's War Pigs. As the opening riff crashes through the square, Coyne whips a stream of glitter into the night like some psychedelic exorcism. "Fuck yeah!" erupts from every corner, swallowed almost instantly by the roar of the crowd.
A short pause before the encore. ‘A Spoonful Weighs a Ton’ intro glimmers. Coyne seems lighter now, relieved to have reached the end of an emotionally charged night.
During the twinkling outro, as the word ‘LOVE’ boldly blinks, I look at the mother and daughter in front of me. The kid might be a little too big to be carried now, but her mother does so anyway. The kid looks into her mother’s face and traces the edges with her small fingers. It reminds me of when I used to do that to my own mother’s face, and how one day, I’ll have just stopped doing that. I wonder if I was too big to be carried then.
Louis Armstrong’s, ‘A Wonderful World’ closes us out from the soundboard.
For me, and maybe for you too if you’re reading this, Flaming Lips shows do something that only a few acts I’ve had the privilege of seeing do. They show life. They condense the non condensable and mirror it back to you.
The music may not be “commercially” perfect, but that’s never been the point. The shows are fucking weird and wonderful and sad and really, ridiculously happy. They are fucking mental but there is a soul that beams out of them that is more than just "a vibe."
Coyne can spend one song talking about his dead brother before firing confetti into the sky. A crowd can quietly grieve together before bursting into a gleeful frenzy. A mother carries her child. A man remembers someone he lost. Phones rise into the air. Someone sings completely off-key (me). Somehow, all of these things belong together.
Life is full of loss but it's equally full of life. You know?