Lauren Laverne Meets The Flaming Lips

added 06 November 2003 at 14.00

Standing in for Zoë Ball, Lauren Laverne welcomed the Flaming Lips to Xfm for an exclusive live session and a typically eclectic discussion of legendery live shows, the biggest balloons in the world and comatose pandas.

It's been an amazing year for Wayne Coyne's The Flaming Lips - a series of triumphant festival appearances and their fantastic 'Fight Test EP' had made them one of the most critically adored bands around. As the band round off their year with a pair of staggering, sold-out shows at the Hammersmith Apollo and the 'Ego-Tripping At The Gates of Hell' EP/remix mini-album, they visited the Xfm studios to chat to Lauren Laverne and play a couple of exclusive tracks.

Read interview highlights below or hit the [listen] links to hear the whole thing.

On The Breathtaking Hammersmith Shows

"If they have it there, they'll throw it at us. We've done this for a long time and sometimes we'd throw out candy, we'd throw out fruit from backstage - it comes right back. So you know what we throw at the audience now? Balloons. They come back at you but, hey." [listen]

Answering Your Questions
"We use up about ten or twelve of the really giant balloons and about 100 of the semi-big ones. So when we go on a tour where we're gonna play 20 shows in a row, imagine the truckloads of balloons and confetti that I carry around. It costs about $10,000 to do ten shows. You could buy a decent car for that." [listen]

Hit the links below to hear the exclusive session tracks.

The Flaming Lips - 'Sunshine Balloons' [Dial-Up] [Broadband]
One of the new tracks from the 'Ego Tripping...' EP/mini album. Opens up with a spoken-word, 'Malcolm In The Middle'-style monologue from Wayne, about how love is a happy cosmic accident and so on. Nice, a classic Flaming Lips tale of interplanetary sunbeam surfing.

The Flaming Lips - 'Ego Tripping At The Gates of Hell' [Dial-Up] [Broadband]
The title is described by Wayne as sounding 'horrible', before he goes on to assure us that it's really a very optimistic song about catching yourself before an artist becomes a diva. Haunting, warm and mournful.

www.flaminglips.com 

Tagged as The Flaming Lips, archive

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