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We see Miley all the time and she’s great friends with my girlfriend Katie so there are those deeper connections that keep her in my world as opposed to just music.” 'We try to play music that we know the audience is expecting to hear. We may do another album together sometime.
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“We were open, as we always are, to see where this experience could take us. “We just hit Miley at the right time where she was thinking ‘I’m itching to make another weird record’ and we were in that same sort of zone,” Coyne explains. The Miley Cyrus connection led to The Flaming Lips working with her on Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz, appearing on over half of that 2015 album’s tracks. When we did ‘Lucy’ with Miley we all liked it and that’s what prompted us to do the other Pepper tracks with other people and we released it as a charity record.” Paul McCartney’s songs are like anybody can do them and it’s still a great song, but John’s songs are kind of tricky when you take John out of the song you’re missing not just his great singing, but something in his character that is difficult to replace. To give her credit, it’s no easy feat to do a John Lennon song and make it your own. Not long afterwards we ran into Miley Cyrus and we had that track and got her to sing it, and when everyone heard her take they were blown away. We’d done ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ with Sean Lennon on The David Letterman Show. "It was the same with Sergeant Pepper that was another convenient thing to do while we were working with other artists. The installation is shaped like a big head and you fall inside its giant mouth, you’re crawling inside it and you lay inside this insane 3D light show and accompanying it is Flaming Lips' music' 'We have a record we’re putting together for an art installation. Then it became popular so Warner Brothers issued it. The Pink Floyd record was only intended to be like a B-side when our Embryonic album was released. It’s a lot easier and more casual to play a Beatles or Pink Floyd track while we’re all sitting around. Coyne explains how these came about “We have our own studio and when groups come through we’re always like ‘Let’s go down to the studio’. The Lips’ colourful CV includes full-set reworkings of Dark Side Of The Moon and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the latter disc titled With A Little Help From My Fwends ). That is a good description with Oczy Mlody there were definitely moments we hit upon, like ‘Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes’ and ‘One Night While Hunting for Fairies.’ that felt really great and ‘The Castle’ has fairytale imagery but it’s also a sad song.” It has nothing to do with our actual reality other than, as you say, the internal optimism or anxiety. "It’s part of what The Flaming Lips are if we’re singing about UFOs and wizards, it’s like from a fairytale but also from the future. With The Flaming Lips, even when we get ‘fantastical’, it's still rooted in something we are really feeling or struggling with, but that whimsical flavour is definitely a fun, imaginative, freak element that makes for great evocative storylines. If you are an adult and have responsibilities then it is perfectly acceptable to have some anxiety here and there. “When the music is too whimsical or ‘fairytale-ish’ it doesn’t really have a connection to you and I like it to be connected. The group’s last studio set was 2017’s Oczy Mlody which fused childlike, fairytale magic with adult anxieties. I was listening through Greatest Hits last night and I definitely see the thread going through it of our enthusiasm just to embrace a million ideas at one time and fit them all in.” Also, a lot of our music, like The Soft Bulletin, we made when we were in our late thirties and anything that happens to you after you’re 35 just feels like a couple of years ago. Sometimes these songs are so popular you’re never really away from them. “And then some of it, like ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, has always been with us. “Some of the music, when it is so old, you can have a hard time fitting it in to the person you are now I’d be thinking ‘Who is this? Oh yeah, that’s us!’” he replies. Ahead of their Galway visit, band leader Wayne Coyne chatted with me about their music and I began by asking whether these recent albums have led him to reconsider those formative songs. The past few months have seen the Lips revisit their extensive back catalogue, with the release of Greatest Hits, Volume 1, as well as two releases that remaster their earliest recordings Scratching the Door and Seeing the Unseeable.
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Freewheeling, prolific, and endlessly inventive, the band remain as full of zip and ideas today as when they started out more than 30 years ago. ONE OF the surefire musical highlights of GIAF 2018 is The Flaming Lips’ gig in the Heineken Big Top on Thursday July 26.