On the cusp of their upcoming Australian tour, I caught up with Wayne Coyne, the frontman of The Flaming Lips. We discussed the enduring popularity of their album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which has been celebrated for over 20 years. Coyne reflects on the song “Do You Realize?” and its transformation into a symbol of the band. He recounts meeting Yoshimi from the Boredoms at the Lollapalooza festival and her contribution to the album. Coyne also touches on the themes of technology and mysticism in their music, emphasising the positive aspects of technology and its role in their creative process. He concludes by highlighting the importance of creative freedom and experimentation in their work.
Hello Wayne, how’s it going?
It’s going great. I’m sitting in my bedroom here in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it’s three degrees outside, but it’s a beautiful winter day and life is great.
Well, I think it’s going to be 20 something here today, so, it’s gonna be good weather for you when you come down.
Well, we’re kind of used to traveling the world. You don’t get too caught up if the weather is good or bad, it’s all great. I live in Oklahoma. Oklahoma gets the worst summer, the hottest summer, the coldest winter; it gets earthquakes, tornadoes, the worst rain, the worst dry. So, we’re kind of used to it; whatever’s happening won’t last long. We always say, as long as you have a Starbucks and the Internet, life’s going to be pretty good.
You’re touring your album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. How does it feel having an album that that has endured for 20 odd years?
Well, it’s amazing. There’s a lot of things that happen and you don’t really have that much control over it. I think we’re very lucky that we love it. There was a lot a lot of love put into it when we were making it, so, it’s not attached to anything too embarrassing or too painful. When it’s celebrated by other people, it’s easy to join in. It would be kind of a torture if it’s something that you didn’t like or didn’t have much to do with it or whatever. But no, we’re lucky that everything attached to it is great. The same would be true for the record that came out in 1999 – The Soft Bulletin. And really, ever since they’ve come out, these would be the songs that we play every night anyway.
Especially the song, “Do You Realize?” Over time, it’s just become more and more attached to whatever it is that is the meaning of The Flaming Lips. Luckily, it didn’t happen over a weekend. It’s taken a long time, so, we’ve embraced it, we’ve gotten used to it, we’ve learned to love it, and now we’ve learned to really be that thing. I think in the beginning, when “Do You Realize?” started to be played it at weddings and funerals and stuff, we were just, why do we want a song that? Why are they doing that? But in time, we thought it’s amazing that songs can do that. It really stops being about what you made, and it sort of becomes its own thing. When that happens to you, you’re, oh my gosh, I could see where some people would be tortured by that.
I listened to a podcast on your website about “Do You Realize?” One of the things you mentioned was that you became a servant of the song. To me, it’s always an interesting concept that, as a songwriter, I guess it’s like children; you create them, but they’re not yours. They have their own life, right?
Or some songs don’t have any life – you just simply make them, and they are what they are. But with “Do You Realize?” luckily, I wasn’t that young when we made it. I think if I would have been, 21 or something, I may feel I’m not that person anymore. That doesn’t represent me. I was already 40 years old or whatever, and we’d already made a lot of records. I didn’t have big expectations or anything going into it. But I could tell from the minute we finished it, in a sense, people were drawn to and people liked it. That’s a great thing, because you don’t really know why. There is always an element of some kind of mystical magic that happens when a song is able to transcend just being lyrics and melodies and yes, you try to do that every time, if you can. And some people do it more often than others. So, there was an inkling of, we’ve stumbled upon something here, but for us, personally, it didn’t feel drastically different from other songs. We were making a bunch of songs in those couple of weeks when we made “Do You Realize?” Don’t get me wrong, there’s other songs, especially “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”, that people really love. But in time, you could see where that that song sort of stands, as like popularity.
The artist Yoshimi – how did you meet her, and how did she get involved in the in the record?
Well, we were on, I think, the second year of the big American festival, Lollapalooza. It was the birth of all that old-school alternative festival, and it was an exciting time. We were on the Lollapalooza, which was supposed to be that Nirvana was going to play. There was definitely an element of once Nirvana was on; we want to be on that. The Beastie Boys were there. I got to know Nick Cave. I still know Nick Cave now from that festival. And the Boredoms played. We already had known the Boredoms music, but with these festivals back then, you would all travel around together. So, we probably played 15 shows, and we would travel around, and you’d see everybody backstage, and you’d see people in hotels and airports and all that. We got to know the members of the Boredoms, which Yoshimi is one of the members, okay? I don’t speak any Japanese. They don’t have very much English. So, we would have emotional things together, but we couldn’t really talk, but we loved their music. Yoshimi herself would still be in the Boredoms, but she put out records of her own. It’s not too long of a story. Her records are called, OOIOO and I think it’s the second album we just fell in love with, and we played it and played it a lot right after The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999.
We started to make the record that would become Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, (we didn’t know it was that in the beginning), and she was touring around America playing shows. We just connected up with her and said, “why don’t you do some stuff on a couple of songs?” We just had a couple of songs that we were putting together, and she played some trumpet, and she did some screaming and some singing. We only had a couple hours together, and we took it, and we started to make songs out of it. We did a song that didn’t have a name for it. It was an instrumental, and we were throwing little bits of her, Yoshimi’s screaming into it, and the more of these little pieces of her screaming that we threw into the song, the better it became. Now the whole song has her, and Dave Friedman, our producer, said this sounds like Yoshimi is in a fight with a robot, something like that. Yoshimi battles the… and I, of course, added in that they’re pink robots. Battles the pink robots. I think we just thought that sounds a great album title, and we quickly wrote another song that would be “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots part one”. We started to make an idea of how this would all fit together under Yoshimi battles the pink robots. Not really thinking of Yoshimi as a real person, but just kind of a character in this concept or whatever. So, they are in still in contact with us. Still love her music and will probably eventually play some version of “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” live, with her playing trumpet and drums and singing and stuff.
That’d be awesome. The whole thing is about robots versus mysticism, and I’m just reading E. M. Forster’s book, “The Machine Stops.” It’s written in 1912 and it describes a future where everyone lives in a pod, and they’re all connected to the rest of the world via artificial intelligence. No-one goes into the real world, and no-one talks to anyone directly. It’s really quite fascinating. It was written 100 years ago, but it’s still relevant to today’s world. What I get about your music is robotics, but the mysticism as well, the ability to transcend life and living in the future with these robots just sort of fascinates me.
Well, there’s some kind of archetypical connection when you see robots and people in there, are we in a fight? Is it fighting against some evil technology, and is technology here to ruin us? Well, I don’t think that. I mean, I love technology. You and I are able to speak to each other in real time. I remember back when I first started to do interviews with people, even people in England, you’d talk, there’d be this clunky delay talk back, and it was like having a can on a string, and you and I are talking to this thing. I see you. You see me. We hear each other in real time. And I don’t feel that this has made us more disconnected. I feel like it’s made it easier for us to say things to each other. So, I feel just the opposite.
Even we were making Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, I think that there’s a part of it that makes it seem like she’s battling the robots because they’re evil and technology is taking over. But that isn’t really what’s happening. The robots end up being better than humans, and that’s where she’s sad that she has to fight them, because really, the robots in my story anyway, they are they are wonderful, and they do care, and they are truthful, and they help people, and you don’t need to love them back. They give love without getting love back. And she’s the only one that knows that. Everybody else kind of looks at them as being just technology. Is it good, or is it bad? She’s the only one that knows, because she’s fought this one.
I would say, without technology, The Flaming Lips probably wouldn’t really exist, because it would just be too difficult to make music. I think computers, auto tune, all these things that make it less painful to music has absolutely helped us. Previous to all that, we made quite a few records before computers and all that, but it was hard. We would fight and we would sweat, and we would have regrets, and we would hate each other.
Like some of your early experiments with the “Boom Box Parking Lot” and “Zaireeka”?
All those are wonderful, I mean, when you get to do crazy stuff, that’s just joyful. I don’t know if the audience agree, but for me, all that stuff is amazing. That’s part of the wonder of the freedom of being just successful enough that you kind of have some freedom to do just whatever you want to do. And yes, I think every artist wants that you’re not so much under stress to do something that’s always going to succeed. You can just play around. And so, I do plenty of that, for sure.
I feel that for The Flaming Lips, the music is just a subset of the greater art. For example, when I saw your show in Falls Festival back in 2012, you invited people up on stage, and you’re in the in the big ball floating across the crowd.
Well, I’m just a creative person. And so, I always just feel, well, let’s try this. Let’s try that. And The Flaming Lips, it’s music. I mean, some of it is sombre, some of it is emotional, and some of it, it sort of requires that the audience has to kind of get inside themselves or leave themselves. It’s not really party music. And we didn’t like that, we didn’t want that. Everybody has to sit there and listen because you kind of want them to be excited and beat each other up or whatever. So, it was our way of saying, this is still exciting, even though we’re kind of doing sombre music about death and stuff, but we don’t want you to be bummed out. It lets us play and then lets the audience play while this other thing is being said in the music. If you would have asked me, do I think it works, I’d have been, I don’t know if it works, but it’s fun to be inside of it and to be doing it.
I think in time, the message of the music does get to you, and it’s just the music we want to play, but you’re free to, sort of to create an atmosphere by which the audience gets to experience the music. I think that’s our funnest part; we get some say in that.
The Flaming Lips Tour Dates
All tickets available HERE
Thu, 30 Jan AEC Theatre, Adelaide.
Sat, 01 Feb Festival Hall, Melbourne
Sun, 02 Feb Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
Wed, 05 Feb The Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane
