The Flaming Lips Encased Their Concert Audience In Giant Bubbles And The Footage Is Incredible
The most COVID-safe crowd surfing we've ever seen.
The Flaming Lips have taken their bubbled band performances to the logical next COVID-safe step, holding a concert where every audience member got their own bubble to dance in.
The band are well-known for being bubbled up in live performances, but this is the first time they let the punters in on the fun. Previously, lead-singer Wayne Coyne had hinted in interviews that it could be a COVID-19 workaround for the band.
“I mean, it seems absurd, but at first we were just doing it as…not a joke, but just as a kind of funny thing, and now it’s becoming kind of serious and real,” he told music site Brooklyn Vegan. “I’m not suggesting the whole world should do it this way. I’m just saying the Flaming Lips can try it this way.”
And they got to take the idea on a test-run in the band’s hometown of Oklahoma City on Tuesday night.
The show was half test-run, half music video shoot at venue The Criterion — usually it holds around 4,000 people, but with the bubbles, there’s room for a couple of hundred people. The band performed at least two tracks from their newest album American Head, including a dance remix of ‘Assassins of Youth’.
In video footage Coyne posted to Instagram, you can see him, also in a bubble, crowd ‘surf’ above the other bubbles, filled with punters dancing. It’s quite the sight.
As per another Instagram by Coyne, the audience was asked to social distance and wear masks when not bubbled.
All-in-all, it was a successful experiment, and according to Brooklyn Vegan, Coyne said that the band is planning a bubbled tour for ‘after the election’. Watch this space – – sorry festival ‘pig pens’ and drive-in shows, but maybe this is the future of live music?
Listen to The Flaming Lips’ ‘Assassins of Youth’ below, from their sixteenth and latest album American Head.
Photo Credits: Wayne Coyne/Instagram, @dayzieee/Instagram