Bank Holiday Monday Long Song

Nine minutes of wide eyed joy and wonder from the combined talents of The Flaming Lips and Scott Hardkiss should be more than enough of a way to celebrate not just a bank holiday but a week off work for me too. The Flaming Lips cemented their status as one of the early 21st century’s best bands with the release of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in summer 2002, an album which if described to someone who’d never heard it (or of the band) would sound ridiculous…

It’s an eleven song album, psychedelic, space pop which starts out with a world where a young girl Yoshimi is engaged in a life or death battle with some evil machines, giant pink robots. The story of Yoshimi and her fight is dealt with on the first four songs and then the album turns into a metaphysical/ philosophical record with the band taking electronics, hip hop drums and acoustic guitars to create some achingly beautiful, lush, experimental and incredibly memorable songs that deal with life and death, ruminations on beauty and mortality, physics, science fiction, emotion and suffering, ending with a soaring neo- classical piece called Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Pavonis Mons is a volcano on Mars). It is an album that can make you laugh and make you cry. 

See? That doesn’t do it justice at all does it? Or capture what Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots actually sounds like or what it feels like. 

The Flaming Lips followed the album with several singles and EPs. In 2003 they released Fight Test, a seven track EP led by the title track and covers of Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, Beck’s The Golden Age and Radiohead’s Knives Out, a song for Jack White, another Lips song and this remix of Do You Realize?? by Scott Hardkiss.

Do You Realize?? (Scott Hardkiss Floating In Space Mix)

Scott Hardkiss stretches Do You Realize?? out for over nine minutes, the song’s cosmic wonder underpinned by throbbing bass and rackety machine drums, piano, bells, heavenly choirs and Wayne Coyne’s vocal front and centre. 

The lyrics are something else aren’t they? Again, written down they could look trite or like the kind of positivity affirmations one sees on social media but Wayne’s voice gives so much emotional heft and conviction that they feel like the truth being given courtesy of a kooky 21st century Moses.

‘Do you realize? That you have the most beautiful face? 

Do you realize? We’re floating in space

Do you realize? That happiness makes you cry

Do you realize? That everyone you know some day will die’

All these things are true. Happiness can make you cry, it happens all the time. Everyone you know some day will die, time is short, we’re here for an instant. Whenever I look at photos of people from a century ago, those people and their lives, the stories you can see in their eyes, the battles they faced and the things they felt- I feel this and think of Wayne’s line, all those people, they’re all gone. 

Wayne doesn’t just hit us with these four lines though, revealing the vastness of space and time, the bigger than us nature of the universe. He follows them with something to do about feeling infinitesimally tiny.

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes

Let them know you realize that time goes fast

It’s hard to make the good things last

You realize the sun don’t go down

It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

These would be just more Instagram positivity quotes in the wrong hands but Wayne Coyne is the right pair of hands. Scott Hardkiss is too, allowing the remix to serve the song and ending with Wayne, as the song should, his isolated voice gasping and singing ‘Do you realize?’.

I read an article last week that made me think of this song, an article with this headline- ‘Euclid telescope spies rogue planets floating free in the Milky Way’. Apparently astronomers have discovered dozens of planets that have broken free from the gravitational hold of their suns and are floating freely, inside the Orion nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas, 1500 light years away. The article says they are ‘destined to drift through the galaxy unless they encounter a star that pulls them into orbit’. 

Do you realize? We’re floating in space. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

‘The Flaming Lips’, it says at Wikipedia, ‘are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1983 from Oklahoma City. I suppose psychedelic rock band covers them but they’re much, much more too, they’re the sort of band who have an idea- let’s come on stage in a giant bubble and roll out over the audience, let’s have confetti cannons, and dancing skeletons, let’s do a twenty three track album with Miley Cyrus, let’s record an album with instrumentals, drum machines and the most gorgeous, existential acoustic guitar pop song of the 21st century- and then just do it. I haven’t followed their entire career, there are gaps in my collection but what I have I love. Psychedelic music is, I think, supposed to be expansive- in terms of sound, ambition and minds and Wayne Coyne and the musicians, dancing aliens and skeletons, fellow travellers and merry pranksters are very much on a long trip of expansion and adventure. 

The bulk of the songs here are taken from the trio of albums they recorded between 1999 and 2006 with Dave Fridmann producing. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

• The Observer
• Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
• Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung
• She Don’t Use Jelly
• Silver Trembling Hands
• Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell
• The W.A.N.D.
• Race For The Prize
• Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1
• The Golden Path
• Do You Realise??

The Observer and Race For The Prize are both from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, an album that shifted their sound from alt- rock into something else, a lush, wide eyed, tripped out, expansive, late 20th century Pet Sounds psychedelia. Race For The Prize,a song about two scientists competing to do good for the whole of mankind, is a song that is always associated with Isaac for me for various reasons that I may come back to at some point in the next few weeks.

Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell are all from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, their 2002 masterpiece, a maybe/ maybe not concept album about a Japanese girl fighting giant robots, space, life and death, mortality, gravity, the precarious nature of existence, love, survival and pretty much everything in between. They do this with a mixture of lighter than air pop songs, instrumentals and electronic/ acoustic melancholic joy, reaching a climax with Do You Realise?? a universal secular hymn to human existence.  

The W.A.N.D. and Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung are from 2006’s At war Wit The Mystics. The W.A.N.D. is Black Sabbath at the indie disco, pure exhilaration. W.A.N.D stands for The Will Always Negates Defeat. 

She Don’t Use Jelly is a 1993 single, a U.S. indie rock ode to idiosyncrasy. She don’t use jelly (jam for those of us in the U.K.)- she uses vaseline. 

Silver Trembling Hands is motorik psyche from their 2009 album Embryonic.

The Golden Path is not a Flaming Lips song but singer Wayne Coyne with The Chemical Brothers, released on Tom and Ed’s first greatest hits CD in 2003. Over thumping, pulsing, festival dance music Wayne talks about a meeting with a mysterious spectre, the afterlife and his lack of belief in a heaven and hell, worlds in opposite duality before breaking down at the end and pleading to be forgiven.  

The Perfect Life Is All We Need

This is one of the most euphoric, everything- and- the- kitchen- sink remixes Andrew Weatherall produced during the last decade (and I’m shocked to find out on checking it was from as long ago as 2013). Another Perfect Life is a stunning, soaring, ecstatic sounding eight and a half minutes, Weatherall reshaping Moby and Wayne Coyne into something new. And while the lyrics appear to be about a junkie and hence the perfect life is actually an opiated delusion, it’s as good a tune as any for today. 

Another Perfect Life (Andrew Weatherall Remix)