Flaming Lips overwhelm at the House of Blues, Orlando

Since I could not make the Boca Raton show this Saturday, I could not allow a chance to miss the Flaming Lips live, so we made the drive from Miami to Orlando on Thursday. It should go without saying that they did not disappoint. Anyone who has attended a Flaming Lips show knows it is much more than watching a group of guys on stage regurgitating their catalog of songs in a live setting. The Lips are an EXPERIENCE (yes, in all caps).

To warm up the Lips fans, who are always the freakiest audience (you’ll see lots of oddball costumes at a Lips show) but still one of the more polite concert crowds, Le Butcherettes took the stage. They did their nasty punk rock sound justice and singer/keyboardist/guitarist Teri Gender Bender threw herself about the stage in dramatic fashion on many occasions. Even though Ms. Bender sang in English, for some reason I thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if Mexican electro-punk act Maria Daniela y su Sonido Lasser would open up for the Flaming Lips?” Wayne Coyne would later reveal Le Butcherettes actually hail from Mexico City. Here is a video I made of one of their songs, “Bang!”:

Coyne came off as utterly accessible throughout the show. He appeared on stage several times before his band began their show. He would first show up off stage to cheer on Le Butcherettes (and of course, stir up the audience). He would later thank the audience for so warmly receiving Le Butcherettes because, in his words, “Everyone knows the Flaming Lips has the best audience in the world.” He would also warn the audience of the light show they were about to behold because occasionally some people, including members of the Lips’ crew, might feel a bit ill with the brightness of some of their lights.

As the set up for the Flaming Lips stage continued, he and other band members would routinely show up on stage, with house lights on. It was the beginning of the warmest connection between artist and fan on a live stage I had ever experienced. There is no curtain or any notion of staginess to separate performer and fan at a Lips show. That’s why dressing up is encouraged among fans, and why Coyne rolls around in the audience in a plastic bubble, not to mention constantly assaulting the fans with balloons, confetti and streamers throughout the show. They even have groups of costumed dancers on either side of the stage, who seem to act as chaotic cheerleaders to the band and audience. A Flaming Lips live show is a communal experience.

When the show finally began, I had wondered whether we would see the same famously reported entrance of the group at such a small venue. Sure enough, the band brought their giant screen (akin to one of those things you see in stadiums so attendees in the nose bleed section might be able to see what they are missing on stage). As the music started, the band members made their way out from between the legs of a young woman projected on the screen, with Coyne make the last of the appearances, wrestling from a clear sac below the image. The sac then began to inflate in to a giant sphere. Soon enough Coyne jumped into the crowd, who would roll him about overhead. You can watch the latter part of this entrance in the video below, along with the first full song of the Lips’ show, “Worm Mountain.”

Continuing forth is more of the same from the Lips: epic, prog-rock moments interspersed with noise pop classics like “She Don’t Use Jelly.” I was happy to hear lots of the new songs from their amazing art-rocking new album Embryonic (I think it’s one of their best full-length albums ever, yes, even better than the oft-hyped Soft Bulletin). Here are all the rest of the videos I made of the Lips from that night, all are pretty much complete songs:

Here’s the song where Coyne brought out the giant hands linked to an array of laser lights:

Here’s an obscure tune they did from At War With the Mystics:

One last bit that adds to the coolness of the Lips for me, as a Krautrock fan: Their sound tech had an orange jumpsuit with the Neu! logo on it:

And then there was the mess to clean up afterward…

Oh, what the heck, there were a lot of great images captured at the show, here are more: