Flaming Lips - Royal Albert Hall

What a fantastic way to spend a Saturday night in London. Despite the show being advertised as sold out – a fairly impromptu enquiry to the Royal Albert Hall box office the day before the show, turned up two great seats in the upper-circle boxes to see The Flaming Lips at The Royal Albert Hall.

Kim hadn’t seen the Lips before and I had distant memories of a blinder of a show at The Palace in Melbourne to live down – but they didn’t fail to disappoint.

Wayne Coyne comes onstage and inflates his giant clear bubble – then rolls out onto the crowd while giant helium balloons are released, the band start playing an intro, and a group of 20-odd martians take stage right, while 20-odd santas take stage left.

It’s great to hear a few of the classic Lips still sound fantastic – opener ‘Race For The Prize’ is a giddy rush with everything else happening at once, it’s good to see ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ still makes great use of a fish-eye camera and nun puppet. ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ gets a good crowd singalone, while a set closing ‘Do You Realise’ is heart-breaking beautifully – prompting me to ponder my own mortality, and those of loved ones – in the midst of a crazy swirl of streamers, martians, and santas.

This being one of the early shows for their new album “At War With The Mystics” – it was good to hear the new songs live – and the up-tempo songs like “Free Radicals” (complete with Wayne tackling a twin-necked guitar - see pic below) and first (UK) single “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” come across best to me. I think the band still have some work to better integrate the new material into their well worn setlist (they toured “Yoshimi” for what – 3 years?) but ‘Vein of Stars’ – complete with mirror-ball accompaniment – is great.

The encore featured a blistering cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ that had a few of the newspaper reviewers raving – but didn’t really work for me. My only (very) minor gripe – was the amount of non-musical activity going on, and the large number of non-musical performers on stage, was at times in danger of over-powering the music. However the Lips clearly love to make every show an event, and break down the traditional concert performance boundaries, and the succeed on that level hands down!