Warner Bros. RecordsThe Flaming Lips are currently on tour in support of their latest album, Oczy Mlody. The band is known for their elaborate stage show, and for this outing, they have something special planned for their new track "There Should Be Unicorns."
"We've made an LED light-up kind of unicorn that gets pushed from the back of the stage, and I go down into the audience," frontman Wayne Coyne tells ABC Radio. "If you can't see me very well, you get the impression I'm actually riding a horse through the audience, but I'm not, I'm being pulled along on a thing, you know?"
"And it's battery-operated, so it's got all this crazy video LED stuff that's being Bluetooth-ed to it at the same time," he explains. "It's amazing."
Coyne also rolls out a "space bubble" when the Lips perform David Bowie's "Space Oddity," and he finds that the connection he makes with the audience during those moments is "where all the power is."
"That's why we do the stuff," Coyne says. "We want everybody to be paying attention and to be in awe of it, and to be listening and to be carried away by the emotion and stuff, and not be bored or not to be distracted or whatever."
Coyne adds that "people wrongly think" the crazy stage props and production are a "distraction to the music," but he feels instead that they help form a more communal concert experience.
"I think our music works best when everybody is paying attention to this, and we sing these songs about hope and optimism and all that, and it resonates, it can really resonate," says Coyne. "But without everybody paying attention, it's tough to get that across."
The Flaming Lips' North American tour concludes May 16 in Seattle.
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