The Flaming Lips

Wayne Coyne grew up in Oklahoma City, the fifth of six children. In 1977, still in high school, he started work as a fry cook at a Long John Silver’s. In his second year there the restaurant was robbed and the staff were held face down at gunpoint, and he was sure he was going to die. He kept the job until 1990.

In 1983 he formed the Flaming Lips with his brother Mark singing and Michael Ivins on bass, and they played their first show at the Blue Note Lounge. Mark sang on one EP and then left, and Wayne took over. Three albums on small labels followed: Hear It Is, Oh My Gawd!!! and Telepathic Surgery.

The drummer Nathan Roberts and the guitarist Jonathan Donahue, who also played in Mercury Rev, joined in 1989. In a Priest Driven Ambulance was the band’s first record with the producer Dave Fridmann, made in a college studio at $5 an hour on a $10,000 budget.

It is a concept album about Coyne’s fascination with religion. The tape loops and effects of the earlier records moved to the front, and Coyne now sang in the high, strained voice he has used ever since. In 1990 a Warner Bros. scout saw a show at the American Legion Hall in Norman where their pyrotechnics nearly burned the place down, and the label signed them.

Their first Warner album, Hit to Death in the Future Head, was held up for nearly a year while a sample from Michael Kamen’s score for Brazil was cleared. Then Donahue left to concentrate on Mercury Rev and Roberts left too. The guitarist Ronald Jones and the drummer Steven Drozd took their places.

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart was the new line-up’s first album. Nearly a year after it came out, the video for “She Don’t Use Jelly” turned up on Beavis and Butt-Head, and the song became their first radio hit.

Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) sold less than the album before it, and after years of touring Ronald Jones left late in 1996. The three who stayed, Coyne, Drozd and Ivins, rebuilt the band around the studio, with Drozd turning multi-instrumentalist.

In 1996 and 1997 Coyne ran the Parking Lot Experiments: he handed out 40 different cassettes to people in a parking lot and had them press play in their cars together, so the music came out of every stereo at once. Zaireeka took the idea home. It is four CDs, each meant to play on its own stereo at the same time as the other three.

Songs that would not split across four discs, “Race for the Prize” among them, were saved for the next album. Meanwhile Drozd nearly lost an arm to an abscess he blamed on a spider bite and later admitted came from heroin, Ivins was trapped in his car for hours after another car’s wheel came through his windscreen, and Coyne’s father died of cancer. “The Spiderbite Song” tells it.

The Soft Bulletin set all of that to huge, layered arrangements, built by detuning and stacking keyboards rather than hiring an orchestra. Critics compared it to Pet Sounds. NME made it album of the year, and Pitchfork gave it 10.0.

The title comes from Yoshimi P-We of Boredoms and OOIOO. Someone in the studio said her singing sounded like she was battling monsters, and Coyne added the pink. She plays on the record. Only the first four songs tell her story, and Coyne has said it is not a concept album.

Under the robots, the songs are about love and mortality. Coyne wrote “Do You Realize??” during the sessions, listening to Drozd struggle through withdrawal as he tried to quit heroin. It became their most popular live song, and they have rarely left it out of a show since.

At War with the Mystics (2006) was heavier, more guitar-driven and more political than the two albums before it, and won two Grammys. By now the band were as famous for the show as the songs: confetti cannons, balloons, dancers in costume, and Coyne rolling out over the crowd inside a giant plastic bubble.

Embryonic went the other way. Coyne wanted a double album that could sprawl like the White Album or Physical Graffiti, less polished, with a “freak-out vibe”, and it came out dark, loose and heavy. It is their highest-charting album, No. 8 on the Billboard 200.

In 2011 the band put out a new song every month, in ever stranger forms: a 24-hour song, EPs on flash drives inside gummy skulls. The Terror was something else. Coyne had separated from his partner of 25 years, and Drozd had relapsed. He holed up in a second studio at Tarbox to make music, Coyne said, to get through it.

“The Terror is, we know now,” Coyne wrote in the press release, “that even without love, life goes on... we just go on.” Pitchfork called it unrelentingly bleak.

Oczy Mlody came out in 2017 and King’s Mouth, narrated by Mick Jones of the Clash, in 2019. American Head (2020) turned toward home: many of its songs look back at Coyne’s growing up with his brothers in Oklahoma City, and the cover is a photograph of his older brother Tommy, taken around 1970.

When the pandemic stopped touring, the band put the audience in bubbles too. In October 2020 they played the Criterion in Oklahoma City to a crowd sealed in their own space bubbles. Ivins’s departure in 2021 left Coyne the only founding member, and Drozd stopped touring after 2024 and later left too. From 2023 to 2025 the band toured Yoshimi, playing it from start to finish every night.