Into Live Music Review: The Flaming Lips
Some concerts begin with a bang. The Flaming Lips began theirs in another dimension.
Rather than opening with a familiar anthem, Wayne Coyne and company drifted into the closing passage of minor hit single It Overtakes Me, a deep cut from At War with The Mystics. It was a dreamlike, slow-burn entry that instantly confirmed this would be no ordinary Kelvingrove Bandstand summer show. Ordinary has never been in their vocabulary.
The setting carried its own poetry. Coyne recalled imagining, aged 14, playing a bandstand like Kelvingrove’s with a cone on his head. Tonight, grinning like a benevolent alien ringmaster, that vision came gloriously true. It felt less like a gig and more like an apparition finally stepping into daylight.
With Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, the stage erupted into pure technicolour joy. Inflatable pink robots rose like friendly monsters while giant balloons ricocheted through the crowd. Children, parents, lifers – everyone became part of the performance, swatting colour back into the Glasgow sky. There was no boundary left between stage and audience, only shared wonder.
For all the spectacle, the music never took second place. Five Stop Mother Superior Rain was the night’s towering peak – four multi-instrumentalists locked into something genuinely transcendent. Shimmering keys, layered harmonies and waves of fuzzed-out slide guitar from AJ Slaughter built a sound both fragile and immense. Coyne’s lyrics still land like a jolt of truth: “My hands are in the air… You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t.” Few bands turn existential dread into something so euphoric.
The visual invention never let up. A giant star-headed figure and its children appeared, drifted across the stage like a living hallucination, cuddled Coyne, then disappeared again. And, in parallel, the setlist continued to underline their musical legacy—long before LCD Soundsystem refined the idea, The Flaming Lips and The Chemical Brothers performing The Golden Path had already mapped the terrain where dance music meets cosmic rock.
Then came a moment of stillness. Every Teardrop Cried, written for Coyne’s late brother, arrived like a held breath. As an alien figure embraced him on stage, the evenings carnival vibe softened into something tender and raw. Coyne visibly faltered. The crowd fell utterly silent. For a few minutes, the spectacle gave way to something deeply human and intensely personal.
The joy returned with She Don’t Use Jelly, all Pulp-esque skewed charm and off-kilter brilliance, before The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song detonated into inflatable eyeballs and giant singing lips – funny, surreal, slightly unsettling, and completely irresistible.
And then Do You Realise??—still one of the great modern anthems. Its message of love, mortality and gratitude remains undimmed. Like All You Need Is Love refracted through a kaleidoscope, it turned Kelvingrove Bandstand into a single, unified voice. Beneath all the chaos and colour, this is where The Flaming Lips truly live: in songs that mean everything.
The encores balanced tribute and celebration. A feral, glorious cover of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs honoured fellow ‘outsider’ Ozzy Osbourne, with drummer Matt Duckworth pounding away like a psychedelic Animal from The Muppets.
Finally, Race for the Prize brought it home. Encased in his giant transparent bubble, Coyne stared at the crowd, appearing trapped and free at the same time – triumphant, absurd, and somehow vulnerable all at once. As the band and crowd sang, “They’re just humans with wives and children,” it became crystal clear, a hymn to fragile, determined humanity.
The Flaming Lips don’t just play shows – they build temporary worlds where joy, grief, absurdity and beauty all co-exist at full volume. If 10cc had decamped to Oklahoma in the 1970s and raised a family on science fiction, bubble machines and pure imagination, they might have sounded like this.
Treasure them. There has never been another band like The Flaming Lips and there almost certainly never will be again.
Brian Davidson @weepeople1
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