It’s almost eleven years since my whole appreciation of music was scattered like tickertape at a windy parade and reconstituted from its debris. It happened quickly, during an event that couldn’t have lasted more than 45 minutes. And it happened almost entirely by chance. It was during the final hour of V2000 (a festival renowned now, and perhaps then too, for being gaudy, mainstream and corporate), approaching a timeslot filled with bands that my friends and I didn’t much care for that we chose to take a punt on the Flaming Lips.
They were utterly, breathtakingly, painfully, beautifully, harrowingly mesmerising. Still I can’t do it justice; still I can’t quite give you an iota of how profound it was. I can evangelise all I want, I just can’t do it. You might say it was a religious experience. I remember leaving the show and having to check I hadn’t hallucinated everything – the carefully stitched videos accompanying each song ranging from surreal to downright disturbing, the balloons, the melodies. This night had completely skewed my approach to music, both making it and listening to it, and it’s stayed with me ever since.
The next day, I picked up Hit to Death in the Future Head (released 1992) and The Soft Bulletin (1999) and realised it was the latter that I’d experienced almost in its entirety the night before. After that, I explored the Flaming Lips discography both backward and forward, getting to grips with their back catalogue and picking up new albums on their release. And as much as I love a lot of their albums, nothing they’d made before or were to make after The Soft Bulletin has matched it – it’s truly a masterpiece.
I’ve seen the Flaming Lips about 5 or 6 times since then and although I’ve had some incredible Lips experiences (!), none have come close to the first time I saw them. I have some ideas why: as they produce more and more albums, they understandably want to tour new stuff, so Soft Bulletin material gets overlooked; and Wayne sometimes get a bit too talkative and preachy between songs which makes gigs disjointed (though there might be practical reasons for buying time in this way). But mainly it’s the first reason for me, which makes me sad, nostalgic and wistful, I know.
But last August, it was announced that the Flaming Lips would be doing a one-off performance of the Soft Bulletin at Alexandra Palace this July. On September 3rd at 9am, the tickets went on sale. On September 3rd at 9am, I was on the phone ordering them. They still haven’t arrived; I’m terrified!
My unbearable excitement for this gig is tempered by anxiety. I’m not 18 anymore (woe!). What if I’ve been romanticising the band? What if that memory is tarnished this summer? What if I go back to listening to Britpop? Christ, it’s enough to make you shudder! So for the most part I’ve been ignoring the fact that it’s getting closer and closer.
But in recent weeks, it’s been announced that the Lips will be playing at the Eden Project and Jodrell Bank either side of their Ally Pally foray. Neither gig will be a Soft Bulletin performance, but in a few ways I’ve been wondering if I’d be better off going to one of them instead. I mean, they won’t have to live up to just one night eleven years ago, rather the cumulative total of what I’ve seen of their best and their… not so good performances – so much better odds!
Those doubts are fleeting though. I still love the Soft Bulletin as much as the day I first discovered it, if not more. It’s the album as much as the first time I saw the Lips that has had a huge impact on me. The thought that I’ll have one more chance to experience the Soft Bulletin live, and with the one I love, just thrills me, even if I’m less naïve than I used to be.
[...] classic albums, I’d been looking forward (or should that be backward?) to this performance through the romantic lens of my 18-year old self for quite some time. I was also intrigued about the opening performances: Deerhoof and Dinosaur Jr [...]