The Flaming Lips, good-natured psychedelic rockers from Oklahoma, have a dual musical identity. On one hand, there’s the folksy band who love sentimentality and sweet tunes. Then there’s the freaky band who make fabulously impractical albums like 1997’s Zaireeka, a four-CD set designed to be played simultaneously on four sound systems, or their latest longplayer Embryonic, a double album of psych-rock jams of which singer Wayne Coyne admits: “I would say that we, in the course of making this record, did, on all levels, completely lose our way.”
These two sides of their personality were in perfect sync at The Troxy, a former bingo hall in east London whose turquoise and yellow art deco décor and faded air of leisure provided a suitably surreal setting for the band’s gleefully unhinged live show.
The quartet made an attention-grabbing entrance – details are tricky to convey in a family newspaper but suffice to say it involved a luminous birth canal – which was followed by Coyne, standing in an inflatable ball, rolling out over the audience’s heads. His bandmates punched out a crisp, guitar-heavy rendition of one of their signature songs, “Race for the Prize”. Confetti exploded overhead and dozens of huge balloons bounced around the venue. Dancers dressed as cats jiggled in the wings of the stage. It was a mix of Edward Lear, Timothy Leary and Sesame Street.
New songs tilted more towards the Timothy Leary side of things. Eerie red light bathed the band during “Convinced of the Hex”, with Coyne chanting, like some freak power relic, “That’s the difference between us” over spacey guitar solos and spooked keyboard effects. “Evil” was an acid-rock fantasia about going back in time to an evil-free prelapsarian idyll: San Francisco in 1967, presumably.
Thank goodness, the stoned Grateful Dead-style odysseys didn’t get out of hand. Powerful krautrock drumbeats drove several new songs on like pistons, while guitarist Steven Drozd maintained a welcome preference for crunchy distorted riffs over noodling solos. Coyne, grey suit matching his grey curls, was a genial showman, theatrically pausing during old favourites such as “Do You Realize??” to whip the audience up and illustrating, with a display of contagious enthusiasm and energy, lyrics about capturing the moment. The Flaming Lips aren’t so far-out as to lose sight of their mission to entertain. 
