Rather than Waitin’ for a Superman to restore some normalcy to these COVID times, The Flaming Lips realized they could use their famed space bubbles in a live concert as a way to protect themselves — and their fans as well.
Space bubbles have been a part of The Flaming Lips’ repertoire since Wayne Coyne and company appeared on stage in the inflatable spheres at the 2004 Coachella festival. In June, the band produced a musical performance for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” featuring about 20 audience members in similar bubbles.
That led to last week’s performance in Oklahoma City at local club called The Criterion, where the Lips played a mini-concert for more than 100 fans while also shooting a music video for the new songs “Assassins of Youth” and “Brother Eye.”
“It turned out more spectacular and more positive than I could have ever thought,” Coyne told Variety. “I worried mostly that something embarrassing would happen or it would look like it wasn’t safe. Now it feels absolutely wonderful.”
Coyne said the event this month was a dress rehearsal for perhaps a full concert that he’d like to do December in the same location. Among the issues the band was looking at: How to safely assemble the audience outside, without it turning into a tailgate party; getting the crowd inside the balloons and blowing them up, without it turning into a super-spreader event; and even, figuring out how many people might need to unzip and go to the bathroom during the show. (For the record, none of the 116 attendees needed to go during this show.)
“Part of the dilemma of doing loud concerts is that it gets people excited. They’re getting drunk and they’re losing their minds and before you know it, they’re grabbing onto each other and they’re screaming in each other’s faces,” Coyne said.
Next up, because the bubbles are so big, Coyne is figuring out how many people to allow inside (there’s room for three) and whether, during a longer show, there should be a break to allow for air refreshing and restroom visits.
There’s also the question of how big the crowd should be. “I thought even the amount of audience we had for the video shoot was a little scary,” Coyne admitted. “Let’s start with a little bit of an audience, and if we have to spread it out, we have to play multiple nights, well, great. That’s better than doing no nights. Let’s play to a smaller audience and make it really work. I feel good about it. We’ve been around a long, long time so we’ve done a lot of stuff. And I think the Flaming Lips audience is the perfect audience to say ‘We’ll help you do this, we can make this work,’ because they’re a very smart, caring, giving kind of an audience.”
Coyne said they’ll announce the next show in November, with a December date, in order to give them a few weeks to figure out how to do it.
“Do you buy the front row? Do you buy by the row? And would people even know what a row is? It’s such an unknown world,” he said. “I feel like we would put one show on sale, and see if anybody wants to go. And then if they did, we’d try another one and go from there.”
A space bubble tour is possible, but Coyne said it would have to be on a very small scale. “I think we can definitely take it to other places,” he said. “I don’t think we’d want to take it on a fly-by-night tour like we’re used to doing before COVID. That’s just too many people having to help — too many flights, too many trucks. But I think we could do something where it’s in the new world, where we go a little slower with a little less people, and be a little bit more aware of who’s breathing on whom and stuff like that.”
Thanks to the band’s nearly two-decade use of them, Coyne has become quite an expert in space bubbles — and by the time of the Criterion show, he had a pretty good sense of how and where to procure the ones that make the most sense for an audience. But then there’s also the issue of keeping those bubbles clean.
It’s an intense disinfectant process. “The next day we pour 20 ounces of the 70% alcohol right into the bubble and then blow it up,” he explained. “We slosh it around, and it coats it pretty well. You can see it dripping up and down the sides and you can kind of get an idea that you’ve covered every surface in there with a good amount. This isn’t a paper towel wiping it down. We let that sit for about an hour, so it’s cooking in there, it’s doing its deed. Then we go in and we blow it up again with the leaf blower. Still, no one has gone in and now it’s turned into fumes, like a vapor in there. Let that sit for about an hour, and then we empty it of all the liquid that’s left. A lot of the alcohol will kind of evaporate, but some of it doesn’t. It gets caught in the plastic folds and stuff.”
“And then someone goes in with a with a pretty good suit on, so the person who’s wiping it down isn’t putting their germs in there. You’re really just wiping out the residue. I looked at the bubbles the day after that to see if they looked any different or were cloudy. But now they look they look pretty close to brand new.”
The Flaming Lips and their audience space bubbles
Scott Booker
Even though Coyne and the Lips are used to playing in bubbles, playing to a crowd also encapsulated has been a new experience.
“There was an excitement, and then I started to kind of jump up and down in my space bubble on stage, which I hadn’t really done before,” Coyne said. “And the audience started to kind of bounce along with me. I’d be pushing my bubble from left to right, like you would if your arms were up in the air but you’re trapped in there, and they’d be pushing their bubbles, side by side. And then when I would bounce, they would bounce. It felt like something utterly new, but something utterly, ‘Of course we’re going to do that, we should have known everybody was gonna do that because it’s a concert.’ The space bubble really just added to the uniqueness and the excitement. I think that part of it is really going to work. Of all the groups in the world, we’re probably the only group that wants to do it and likes to do it. I think for a lot of groups, it would be just too weird.”
But for the Flaming Lips, a video of their audience in space balloons seems very on brand — and would have just been considered an absurd, slightly sci-fi moment.
“But now what’s absurd is that it’s real,” he said of the actual need to be in the bubbles. “And as far as it being safe, that’s the part that we really been focused on. None of it’s worth anything if it’s not going to be safe. If we’re doing our job right as the Flaming Lips, we want you to go as crazy as you want. We want you to be happy, we want you to be screaming and we want you to lose your mind a little bit. Losing your mind means you forget that there’s this virus going around the world killing people. So, for me, you’re in a space bubble, you can get as f—ed up as you want, you can scream and you can go crazy, but you can’t infect the people next to you, no matter what you want to do.”
Coyne noted that the Flaming Lips shot the video in Oklahoma City the same week that the area reported its highest level of COVID infection rates yet. He knows that he’s taking these precautions at the same time a portion of the population doesn’t believe the virus is a real threat.
“You run into people who think, ‘This thing isn’t real,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t really want to argue with you right here, in the street corner.’ But I can’t think that someone would come to a Flaming Lips concert where we’re playing in plastic bubbles and demanding people wear masks, if you didn’t think that the COVID was real.”
“We’re not out of this, and I think that’s part of the dilemma as well,” he said. “You’re starting to run into people that are like, ‘I’m just tired of it.’ You’re like well, ‘Yeah, we are too, but it’s still here.’ That’s the part that is scary as well. As it gets to be winter and you’re not able to be outside as easily, I think the space bubble concert, being indoors, that’s the trick. I know a lot of people are doing things outside, which I think makes a lot of sense. But a lot of these events are gonna have to be inside, because in Chicago, it gets down to 20 below zero. You can’t do anything outside.”
But this is the new normal — and Coyne isn’t so sure things will go back to the way they used to be, at least any time soon.
“I really do love being able to do something that isn’t just waiting for it to be over,” he said. “I do think eventually we will be going back, we probably will be doing concerts again. But I don’t know if they’ll ever be back to normal or back to what it was. I think maybe there should always be restrictions, a little bit, that say, ‘Hey, you can’t go to a concert if you feel like you’re sick.’ I feel like whatever is happening in the future, a couple years down the line, we should all welcome it. That we never get into this situation again where just by breathing on each other, we’re bringing the world to a halt. I’d rather be restricted a little bit and know that we’re not harming each other.”