Fringe music: The Flaming Lips
Ross Bandstand, Edinburgh
Jamie Chambers
Four stars
It's testament to their strange, enduring universality that a band as wilfully idiosyncratic as the Flaming Lips are playing to a packed-out Ross Bandstand tonight, sandwiched between James and The Waterboys.
These days the Lips are more indie-institution than band, so it’s difficult to know who’s going to show up: the cinematic popsters of Yoshimi, or the brooding psych-rockers of The Terror? And will they bring Miley Cyrus?
Mostly the former, it turns out, but sadly no Miley.
You’ll have heard hyperbole surrounding the sheer spectacle the Lips bring to their live shows, but experiencing it in person is truly something to stick on your bucket list. Within minutes the sky is full of streamers and Wayne Coyne is hoisting aloft enormous, inflatable silver letters spelling ‘F**k Yeah Edinburgh’ like some sort of clown messiah. Then he’s crowd surfing in a gigantic hamster ball whilst green aliens and a humongous, besuited catfish appear on stage. Such stagecraft perhaps sounds inane in print, but truly I forgot to question whether the band’s props ever overshadowed their music, I was having too much fun.
Unsurprisingly such inspired pop lunacy proves difficult to sustain and the set latterly grows more fragmented, dissonant and uncertain, with Coyne an increasingly distant presence on stage. It's perhaps a nod to the band’s heavier, more recent material and a reminder that the Flaming Lips are much more than a party band.
Closing the set, the band become distracted trying to time their finale with the Tattoo fireworks, which is a shame: for, as Abandoned Hospital Ship’s opening blast of smoke and confetti deftly illustrated, the Lips at their best are more explosive and more enthralling than any common-or-garden firework.
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