Touting a sombre, just-released album, and having cancelled their first show because frontman Wayne Coyne fell ill, the Flaming Lips look set for a fraught return to the London stage. But in the wake of the devastation inflicted by a tornado on the band's hometown, Oklahoma City, the atmosphere is subdued. "This is a ridiculous event," Coyne states simply. "It's not important. This is what you do when you can't do anything else." But if anyone asks, he adds with a wicked smile, the audience should say it was "the most important fucking show the world has ever seen".
Taking a cue from their powerful dark new direction, the Flaming Lips sacrifice their trademark frivolity for intensity. Rather than bouncing around in a plastic space bubble, Coyne, cradling a baby doll, stands atop a futuristic chrome dome smothered in tentacle-like fibre optics. The confetti that falls is black and the animal costumes have gone, and Coyne forgoes his birthday suit – worn during a recent US TV appearance – for an electric-blue jacket and, he complains, too-tight trousers.
Still unwell, Coyne's fragile vocals slip unsteadily among the dense folds of Look … the Sun is Rising. His vulnerability, though, heightens the seething anger of You Lust, which transforms the frontman from amiable and self-professed weirdo to alarming dictator. But Coyne's singing, painful during Race for the Prize, is obliterated during a faithful, forceful rendition of David Bowie's Heroes.
Having squandered his larynx on a rant against the "motherfuckers" of the world, Coyne suffers a coughing fit midway through the career-defining Do You Realize?? The crowd step in, turning an apparent disaster into a magical highlight that channels the spirit of togetherness the Flaming Lips have been honing for the past 30 years. With the tornado tragedy adding a heartbreaking poignancy to the requiem This Is All We Have Now and haunting encore Always There … in Our Hearts, this was truly memorable.
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