The Best Show I've Seen All Year

In a summer overpopulated with a festival every weekend between May and September, and a multitude, a surfeit, an overdose of summer events, it’s hard to get in any way that bothered or excited to an extent. If its Saturday, it must be the Dorset Surf Festival with Bands You’ve Not Heard Playing To 3,178 people. If its Sunday, it must be Victoria Park in London. There’s also the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. It’s a long long way from Glastonbury, and Reading, and if you were lucky, Donington, way back when in 1990. And then there’s another six festivals next week.

Nonetheless, the Lovebox Weekender, in the previously unimpressive Victoria Park (site of the pisspoor Radiohead show last month), boasts a exceptionally tempting lineup. Originally, when I saw the bill, I looked at it and thought that it looked so good it couldn’t possibly be in London but be in some obscure seaside town nothing ever happens in. With typical festival efficiency, nothing particularly brilliant happens until 6.30pm, when Goldfrapp arrive on stage in a swish of glamour and the MILF-y Alison Goldfrapp herself sways. The only problem with selling sex is that you can’t do when you’re sixty, and Goldfrapp need to move beyond trying to sell the physical and move towards something more substantial. They’re interesting, and slinky, and provide a sleek, alluringly sensual something, but I can’t help thinking that they need more to truly engineer longevity. The records may be maturing, but the live show is still a cross between a fully clothed strip show, a hippyish love in, and a well populated electro pop act slightly past its sellby date.



At the same time, The Dandy Warhols are on the miniscule and packed Gaymer Stage. Zia is still a babe, and the rest of the band are a formaldehyde replica of the shambolic art-rock bohemia that was immortalised in “Dig!”. All of their songs sound a bit like “Bohemian Like You”, and set closer “The Last Outlaw Trucker On Earth” powers along with no shortage of enthusiasm as the Dandys perform their by-now slick and finely-tuned pop machine in a compact 45 minute precis of terminally slightly underachieving American Indie. A mere few yards away, Hayseed Dixie come on like a redneck Kiss. That is, four ageing Americans of indeterminate girth in uniforms and some with face paint, whoopin’ and hollering’ and playin’ shamelessly to the crowd. They do a frenetic take on “You Shook Me All Night Long”, lean to the crowd and do the Gene-Simmons tongue-waggle, say the exact same things between songs every darn night, and make it look like they’re havin’ the great yee-haw night of their lives. Beats workin’ for a livin’.



Perhaps by stealth, the Flaming Lips have quietly graduated to a hugeness akin to a private, secret club. The radio rarely plays their songs, the television even less, they don’t really have any big hits, and yet they’ve slowly and surely moved to headlining 20,000 strong shows. Their reputation for legendary live shows precedes them, and makes them, deservedly one of the bands you should experience before you do. If for nothing else, their music and their work of now reminds me of nothing and no one so much as what I imagine a 1970 Pink Floyd concert would be like : a vast epic, human effort of musical experimentation, outlandish, joyous spectacle, intellectual wisdom and morally sound principles.

The trio, joined by longstanding Uberfan-turned-Flips-drummer Kliph Scurlock, create a finely blended kaliedoscope of music and imagery where anything is possible : songs undulate, breathe, grow, flow, rise and fall, taking excursions into moments of joyous wonder, beauty, and plain and simple utter Nuts Outthereness that demolish the convention of verse/chorus/verse. From the established convention of opening to an instrumental freakout (never yet captured in the studio by the band), to Wayne travelling over the crowd to the stage in a huge transparent ball, to the 50 dancing people in Superhero costumes on stage, to the gigantic inflatables, the ballons, the streamers, flashpots, the gigantic wall of LED’s, the laswers, the wall of ice, The Flaming Lips offer a veritable cornucopia, a whirlpool, a wall of sound. From the opening, and traditional, beauty of “Race For The Prize”, to the closing, and brilliantly philosophical “Do You Realize???”, The Flaming Lips present a complete package that feeds the heart and the mind and the soul of the audience with music that is passionate and committed.



Whilst the F’Lips (as their fans call them) were until the late 90’s a relatively straightforward fair-to-middling rock band, it was only when Steven Drozd ditched the drum kit to become some kind of multiinstrumentalist visionary that the band themselves expanded into something utterly astonishing : the band create a maelstrom of noise that veers between a My Bloody Valentine noisefest and a perverse and brilliant pop group whilst never descending into self-indulgence. The wonderful imagination of songs like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” recast our daily battles - such as the fight for health - into a widescreen moment of cinematic intensity, each of us private heroes in our own wars, as well as some established stalwarts of old, such as the wonderfully silly “She Don’t Use Jelly”, and an ever epic, 10 minute version of “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” which not only debates the ethics of power, but also spotwelds it to an irresistible groove.

Whilst the guts of a Flaming Lips show remain unchanged for at least the past five years, the band themselves have changed considerably. In many ways it feels exactly the same as their Mystics tour of two years ago : and this is no bad thing., The set has been changed substantially, with the addition of oldie “Mountainside”, a cover of Zeppelins “Song Remains The Same”, and newish “W.A.N.D”, “Pompeii am Götterdämmerung” and “Vein of Stars” added to the set from their last London shows 18 months ago, The F’Lips perform passionately as a band with a telepathy that have been doing this kind of thing for years and years and years : they’ve gone beyond music, beyond words, to an intimacy where a glance, a gesture speaks enough. .



Wayne acts as a one man chorus line, switching effortlessly between a massive gong, a battered guitar, a gigantic confetti cannon, and some kind of weird flashing police siren loudhailer. At the heart of all this transcendary, illuminating sound-and-vision storm-und-drung spectacle, a show to match the intellectual feast and the challenged conceptions of the music and the lyrics.

Ultimately, the Flaming Lips are a band of immense heart, with at their heart a burning fire of belief in man as fundamentally good, or a time where equality and happiness is not just possible, but tantalizingly real, and within our grasp. Their music expands my mind, and so far at least, it’s probably the best show I’ve seen all year. My life is better for letting them into my heart. They’re locked into a groove and riding the mothership to musical heaven. Take me with you.

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