The Flaming Lips are testing out "bubble concerts" because this is never going to end
Aux Features Music
Wayne Coyne came to this pandemic prepared. For years now, the Flaming Lips frontman has been performing shows (and fending off airborne viruses) from inside an inflatable bubble. In June, during a performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the singer’s antics took on a new resonance when the audience got bubbled up, too. Now, he’s preparing to test out this distinctly 2020 mode of live performance on a broader scale.
Earlier this week, Coyne and other Lips members posted video and photos from a show at Oklahoma City’s The Criterion, where 100 audience members snug in space bubbles bounced as the band cycled through songs from its latest album, American Head. This follows a photo Coyne posted earlier this month of dozens of deflated bubbles covering the floor of the venue.
According to one concertgoer, the show served as both a music video recording and a “test run” for more concerts in this style. “I mean, it seems absurd, but we at first 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,” Coyne said in an interview with Brooklyn Vegan. “I think that’s kind of the dilemma we’re all in is that are we waiting for it to go back to normal or are we starting to plot, ‘What’s the future look like?’ What is the future of live music?”
He elaborated in an interview with Jambase, noting that more bubble concerts could happen following the election. “The part that we’re trying to get down is what does the crowd do about going to the bathroom and getting drinks?” he said, posing a question that’s been running through our minds since we first saw the bubbles. “We don’t want this to be [a super spreader event] like that Smash Mouth [concert]… The part about playing in the bubble, we already have down. It’s how we get the crowd in and out without cross-contamination that we need to figure out.”
Confront your claustrophobia with some fan footage of the concert below:
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11 Comments
The drinks and bathroom problem kinda solve themselves really. Hear me out: You get me into a bubble half full of beer and by the end of the show it’ll be almost as full but not with beer.Then just hose me down and send me home!
Whoever has the job of emptying the piss bubbles is like one rung below a jizz mopper on the shit job ladder.
or one rung above, depending on said persons fetish…
“Jizz Mopper on the Shit Job Ladder” sounds like a Flaming Lips track title.
Hidden track on Embryonic, if memory serves.
I have been in a thing like that before and they get hot and muggy fairly quickly.
Yeah but, it’s a concert, and most of the time you’re getting hot and muggy no matter what because you’re packed into a crowd of people like a fish in a sardine can. Unless you’re one of those people that likes to sit down at a concert with a glass of wine far away from the stage or something, in which case – bands might as well just start performing live music at wineries, which wouldn’t be the worst idea, possibly.
If this really will never end I’m just gonna jump off a bridge.
Not that I don’t appreciate people trying to make the best of a bad situation while acknowledging and attempting to address it (casting a judgmental eye at you, Smash Mouth) but I think I’m gonna just keep on not going to concerts at all, instead.