Now I just hear it and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck made this record? This is a good record! This is cool!’” We made it so long ago that there are no longer those muscle memory triggers of the struggles and the failures and all that it takes to make music like that. Maybe 20 years is a long time to have figured it out, but now the music affects us too. We’re not those young, innocent guys getting ready to make that transition that ‘The Soft Bulletin’ was about.” But you see it for what it is now? I don’t think we could have made the album if we thought that was going to happen. I don’t think we would have liked that in the beginning. Do you feel a weight around the legacy of ‘The Soft Bulletin’? To celebrate the album on its 20th anniversary, we caught up with Wayne Coyne to talk over the seismic impact that the record had on his life and thousands of others. The band who can do what the fuck they want, and all thanks to the gift that is ‘The Soft Bulletin’. The band who released one album inside a gummy skull and another featuring Nick Cave’s actual blood. The band who got together with Miley Cyrus to explore her freakier side. The band who made the soundtrack for Spongebob Squarepants. To give the album the theatre it deserved, the subsequent live shows shaped The Flaming Lips into the blood-splattered, balloon-loving, laser-fuelled, animal-friendly, festival headlining freakshow inside a giant bubble that you see today. The mad scientists finally cracked the mainstream, the critics gave it top marks, and NME named it as 1999’s Album Of The Year. The Flaming Lips had set their existential musings to what sounded like a cinematic, sci-fi sequel to The Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’. At the very least, they’d saved themselves. The single ‘Waitin’ For A Superman’ is Coyne coming to terms with the fact that a miracle to save his father was not forthcoming, ‘The Spiderbite Song’ is child-like lullaby of love from Coyne to his bandmates in the wake of their recent near-misses, ‘Feeling Yourself Disintegrate’ admits that “ life without death is just impossible” but worth it for love all the same, and ‘Race For The Prize’ is the glorious set-opener telling of two scientists willing to sacrifice everything to save the world.
Liberated by their indulgences on ‘Zaireeka’ and with newfound view on mortality, they emerged with 1999’s bittersweet ‘The Soft Bulletin’ – a symphony of strings, machines and synthetic sunshine. The same few months also saw bassist Michael Ivins have a brush with death in a car crash in Oklahoma City when stray tyre barrelled into his car and forced him off the road. During early sessions for the record, doctors told Drozd that they might have to amputate his whole hand due to what he said was a freak spider bite from the poisonous “fiddleback” (he later admitted it was more likely an abscess from where he’d injected heroin into his hand). With Warners’ interest waning, the follow-up record to ‘Zaireeka was a bit of ‘do or die’ moment, but they also had pestilence and tragedy to contend with.
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