Latest news with #Lips
Scoop
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Mighty: A Small Venue With A Big Voice Lands In Te Komititanga
In celebration of NZ Music Month, a new musical experience is coming to the heart of the city, and it's not what you'd expect. From Tuesday 26 May to Sunday 1 June, a custom-built mini theatre called Mighty will pop up in Te Komititanga, offering the most intimate live gigs you'll find anywhere in Aotearoa. Completely free. Built around a 10-foot shipping container and clad to look like an old-fashioned theatre - complete with red velvet curtains, a rug and a standing lamp - Mighty offers front-row seats to unforgettable performances from some of our most talented songwriters. Each show invites just 4–6 people at a time into the cosy interior, where they'll hear one song, performed totally live and completely acoustic. No mics. No tech tricks. Just voice and guitar or keys. With 20 performances over the week and a line-up of exceptional local talent, there's a twist: while all performers will be announced in advance, their set times will stay secret. It's songwriter roulette, designed to surprise and delight. Some of our brightest lights and rising stars will be performing, including Tiny Ruins, Anna Coddington, Julia Deans, Lips, Romi Wrights, Phoebe Rings, Jazmine Mary, HINA, PARK RD, Rewind Fields, Jol Mulholland + more. Mighty celebrates the power of a single song, shared in person. Live. Acoustic. Solo. Mighty is a love letter to live music, reminding us that sometimes the smallest stages create the biggest moments.
Irish Examiner
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The Flaming Lips review: Wayne Coyne and co hit the heights for brilliant gig at Olympia, Dublin
The Flaming Lips, Olympia, Dublin, ★★★★★ Before they even start, Flaming Lips' sharp-suited front man Wayne Coyne bounds from the wings of the Olympia stage to halt the PA playing Thin Lizzy so he can tell a story. He and his siblings used to sing 'The Coynes are back in town' during the 1970s, and could we try that tonight? The song rewinds, the crowd roar his family's name, and Coyne is already claiming this as 'one of the greatest gigs we're ever gonna play'. The Lips – five of them including Mr Wayne – open with Flight Test from 2002's swirling pop masterwork Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, played in its entirety for this first set. It's hardly begun before the Olympia is a blizzard of monster-shaped confetti, the hypnotic digital backdrop is in full effect (pleasingly, a stagehand has to tap it the odd time to banish gremlins), and two giant pink robots from the album cover are inflated. Coyne's prediction has already proven prescient. He's delighted to be here and why wouldn't he with a band as remarkable as this? They finesse sounds out of keyboards and guitars – and gorgeous pedal steel - that seem drawn from another realm but are anchored to this one by Tommy McKenzie's rubbery bass and the double bass drum heft of Matt Duckworth Kirksey, who looks like John Bonham in a pink wig at a kid's party. Flaming Lips at the Olympia. Massive confetti-filled balloons float over the congregation, adding to the pandemonium when they burst, and the lighting rigs either side of Coyne employ lasers that wouldn't have shamed The Who in their pomp. 'Audiences often sound like drunk uncles but you guys can sing,' Wayne marvels after his vocals are eclipsed by the ecstatic throng's commandeering of Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell. An enormous, light-refracting mirrorball is wheeled on only to be replaced by a floppy rainbow arch for a deeply moving Do You Realize?? Either there was something in the tea that nice man in the wizard outfit gave me or this really is one of the greatest gigs ever. The second half is a best of The Lips celebration including cuts from 1999's spectacular symphonic skyscraper The Soft Bulletin. More balloons fly through She Don't Use Jelly, Coyne dons Peter Gabriel's old flower-head rigout for Flowers Of Neptune 6 and then sports a Wonder Woman muumuu (really) during a superb Waiting For Superman. There are roadies dressed as the sun, as aliens covered in tinsel, then as two oversized dancing eyeballs. The Lips finish with a Race For The Prize which reminds at least one tired hack why he fell so hard for this rock'n'roll stuff in the first place. A joyous, life-affirming, euphoric, and truly psychedelic experience.
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Flaming Lips review – stops and starts make this too much of a good thing
'You could have had a wee and got back,' the chap behind me says to his partner as Wayne Coyne comes to the close of another rambling between-song anecdote in an oddly frustrating, stop-start evening: over the course of two-and-three-quarter hours, there's an awful lot of time when nothing is happening – the gap between She Don't Use Jelly and Flowers of Neptune 6 stretches to seven minutes, what with watching balloons, and Coyne's anecdote about Kacey Musgraves dropping acid. The frustrations start before the band take to the stage. Plainly it is better that Brixton Academy is safe for visitors now, but there must surely be a middle ground where those arriving half an hour before show time don't have to queue for 50 minutes to enter. When the Flaming Lips take to the stage, 15 minutes late, there are still many hundreds outside, and big gaps in the crowd. That's a shame, given that they miss a good chunk of the main purpose of the evening: a complete rendition of the 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That, too, keeps losing momentum, as assorted stage effects are brought on and off between songs (over the course of the evening we get confetti cannon, streamer guns, mirror balls, video screens, giant balloons, costume changes, giant inflatable pink robots, lasers, inflatable rainbows, swinging lamps and more), and the music pauses for minutes at a time. It being Brixton, the sound is boomy and muddy at first. It settles down – but for 20 minutes there's almost no middle. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion After an hour, the band leave the stage for a longish interval before a second set, less gauzy and electronically shaped than the Yoshimi material, but just as suffused with the Lips's peculiar ecstasy: Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung may be the only psych-rock song to ponder the upsides of petrification. But the evening is too much of a good thing, especially when 45 minutes could be shed without even losing a song. By the time a glorious Race for the Prize closes the show, the gaps are back in the crowd, last trains calling time long before the band.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Modest Mouse Go ‘Psychic' For September Seattle-Area Festival
Earlier this month, Modest Mouse announced their own cruise, which sails Feb. 5-9, 2026, on the Norwegian Pearl from Miami to Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Now, the Isaac Brock-led group has revealed plans for their first festival, Psychic Salamander, which will slither over to Remlinger Farms outside of Seattle on Sept. 13-14. Modest Mouse and upcoming tourmates the Flaming Lips will perform both nights, with the Sept. 13 bill also featuring Courtney Barnett, Built to Spill, the Vaudevillian and Mattress. The next night will offer a complete The Soft Bulletin performance by the Lips, as well as sets from Sleater-Kinney, Yo La Tengo, Friko and Sun Atoms. Tickets will be available May 2. More from Spin: Broken Social Scene Look Forward, Back With Tribute LP, Documentary Lorde Returns With New Single, 'What Was That' Riot Fest Rocks With blink-182, Weezer, Green Day The band have been away from the stage since the conclusion last November of their 20th anniversary Good News for People Who Love Bad News tour but will be back in action throughout the summer. Headline dates begin June 9 in Lake Buena Vista, Fl., and include a month-plus stint of shows in tandem with the Lips, beginning Aug. 1 in Atlanta. As for Modest Mouse's Ice Cream Float cruise, it will boast performances by Portugal. The Man, Kurt Vile and the Violators, Mannequin Pussy, Built to Spill, FIDLAR, Tropical Fuck Storm, the Brock side project Ugly Casanova, the Black Heart Procession and comedian David Cross. Fans can expect a twist on Mystery Science Theater 3000, with Modest Mouse's members offering irreverent commentary about films of their choice, a live Q&A with topics chosen by attendees, a story time during which Brock will read children's books, DJ sets and a 'Parade of Freaks,' which is, well, self-explanatory. Ice Cream Floats also includes a port day in Puerto Plata. To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Telegraph
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
She could have been the next Taylor Swift. Then tragedy struck
Amidst the sea of lasers, confetti, man-sized Zorbs and fancy-dressed fans that characterise a typically atypical Flaming Lips concert, it's the girl in the red parrot costume who catches the eye of frontman Wayne Coyne. 'She's perched on someone's shoulders, so I can see her while we're performing,' remembers the frontman of that June 2018 night at Montana's Kettlehouse Amphitheatre. 'This parrot-suited woman, and she's excited. But that's not that unusual.' Later that month, his group headlining the Sled Island Festival in Calgary, Coyne again spots Parrot Girl in the crowd. 'I'm sort of like: 'Oh, yeah, you're this freak,'' says Coyne, approvingly ''I see you're here again.' I don't know that she's just 11-years-old. And [that night] she left a note for me on the tour bus, about us meeting, how we should do music, she's a musician, stuff like that. And then we did.' The girl was Nell Smith. She was born in Leeds General Infirmary on July 17 2007 to English parents, Jude Smith and Rachel Cline. When Nell was five the family relocated from Yorkshire to Canada, her parents keen for, in the words of Jude, 'a complete lifestyle change'. Their sensitive, music-obsessed, skater-girl daughter fell particularly, precociously hard for The Flaming Lips, the triple-Grammy-winning acid-crazed Oklahoma band. Soon Nell and her parents were driving to as many Lips gigs as they could, the British family road-tripping far from their adoptive home in Fernie, a small ski town in British Columbia. After he found Nell's note on the tour bus, Coyne – an unusual rock star in that he prizes connection on every level – texted Jude. He became friends with the family and encouraged their adolescent daughter in her nascent musical aspirations. Nell began teaching herself guitar and Coyne set her the task of learning six Lips songs in a week. Then, when the pandemic nixed plans for Nell to record her own compositions with Coyne at the band's studio in Oklahoma City, he suggested they record versions of Nick Cave songs, starting with Into My Arms. That nine-strong set of covers became well-received album 2021 Where the Viaduct Looms, released on The Flaming Lips' British indie label, Simon Raymonde's Bella Union. That led to Nell joining the band onstage during their 2022 UK tour to sing Red Right Hand. And that, in turn, led to Nell making her own album. Anxious was recorded in Bella Union's Brighton studio in spring 2023 when Nell was 15. Jack and Lily Wolter, the brother-sister musical duo who comprise Penelope Isles, helped her finish and produce her songs. The plan was to release the album this spring when Nell, having finished school, would have the time and focus to promote the record. On October 6 last year, shortly after filming the video for a forthcoming single titled Split In the Sky, Nell died in a car crash in British Columbia. She was 17. Six months later, Anxious – a lovely, 10-song collection of sunshine indie-pop – is coming out as planned, even as everyone involved in Nell's life and music remains, understandably, in raw grief. Remembering Calgary, and the moment in his band's set when he would climb into what he calls the 'space bubble' and bounce over the audience's head, Coyne tells me: 'I sang David Bowie's Space Oddity while I was in the bubble. There's [fan] videos of Nell and I, and we're touching hands through the space bubble. 'I'm singing to the whole audience, but there's moments where I'm singing just to her,' the 64-year-old continues of a scene that Nell herself memorialised in her suitably buoyant song Boy in a Bubble, a personal tribute to Coyne and everything he did for her. 'So, a special moment. Not because she's gonna die later. But these things are just ridiculous, when you think about them afterwards. When things happen.' When he video-calls from the Smiths' home in Fernie, his daughter's Gretsch acoustic guitar hanging on the wall behind him, I ask Jude Smith: how difficult was the decision to release Anxious? 'It wasn't difficult at all, actually,' replies the 49-year-old. 'I remember messaging Simon [about it], probably only a week after Nell died. It galvanised the need to get it out, really. She'd worked so hard on it. I know parents are biased, but I think it's a brilliant piece of work.' His daughter, for all the gung-ho, go-getting spirit she displayed in first connecting with Coyne, was nervous about the album. And, of course, it was a 15-year-old who had made this record called Anxious, a girl as anxious as anyone is at 15. 'She had imposter syndrome. But we knew that people were going to love it. So it just made it really, really, even more important to make sure it got out and got heard.' He and Rachel's daughter (they also have two sons, Ike, 13, and Jed, 20) was 'quite unique from four or five. She was one of those kids who would just hold everyone's attention. She was really good at having conversations with people way older. She was very captivating.' Her father can understand why his daughter and Coyne gravitated towards each other: both supremely caring people who, again, prize the human touch. Jude relays a story his mother back in England recently reminded him of. 'We were somewhere [on holiday] and there was a little girl with Down's syndrome. She was struggling, scared to go down the slide. Nell was there straight away, with her for two hours, helping until she got down the slide.' Another girl, the autistic daughter of a friend of Jude's, 'struggles with friendships and relationships. And right through school, Nell would go around and hang out with her when no one else would. She had this way of breaking down these – sorry.' Jude's tears come quickly, but he quickly regains his composure. 'Just breaking down barriers, because she wanted to make people feel good.' No wonder that the joy-bringing Flaming Lips became her band. At their concerts, the pre-teen would make her parents take her right into the middle of the crowd. Nell would be on Jude's shoulders for the whole set, parroting all the songs. 'People would take photos of her!' smiles Jude. ''Who the hell is that little kid?'' A letter to her musical idol, more connection, was the logical next step for the super-fan adolescent. Jude says that his sister recently sent him a photograph of an earlier note that Nell had written to Coyne but never sent. 'It said something like: 'My name's Nell, I'm 10 years old, and I love your music, and my dream is to go on tour and sing on stage with The Flaming Lips. I'll do anything if I can do that. I would die if I could do that.' All this stuff. 'And all of that came true,' he adds. 'She wrote it down when she was 10. And it all happened. It's just bizarre.' When I video-call Coyne, he's sitting in his car at home in Oklahoma City. The Flaming Lips have collaborated with many artists including Cave, Yoko Ono, Miley Cyrus, Kesha and Erykah Badu. For him, partnering with an unknown, untrained English kid not yet in her teens 'really worked. What Nick Cave does, what a Nick Caves song does, and the status of what he's about, had such a great contrast with Nell. She's like: 'I don't even know what a Nick Cave is! And I don't know these songs. But if you want me to sing them, Wayne, I'll try.' All that set us up for this great combination.' Nell's was a rare talent, somewhere between Laura Marling and Taylor Swift in terms of her precocious teen artistry. As Coyne puts it of his mentee: 'She's not trying to be worldly, or cynical, or tough. She's not trying to be anything. She's just seeing if she can sing the song… It's the sort of thing, if someone else had made it, I would go: 'Oh, wait a second, I've got to hear this.' And I would be pleasantly surprised that it's so genuine and so sincere.' Cave, certainly, was impressed. 'This version of Girl in Amber is just lovely,' he wrote in September 2021 on his Red Hand Files of the album's opening track. 'I was going to say Nell Smith inhabits the song, but that's wrong. Rather she vacates the song, in a way that I could never do. I always found it difficult to step away from this particular song and sing it with its necessary remove. Just got so twisted up in the words, I guess. Nell shows a remarkable understanding of the song, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. I just love it. I'm a fan.' Bad Seed and long-term Cave wingman Warren Ellis was similarly moved. He met the 'bubbling with enthusiasm' Nell backstage at London's Victoria Park, after the Australians played All Points East in 2022. 'She was a bit younger than my kids, but she seemed a normal teenager,' he tells me. 'But her way into the songs was unique. It was a different look at the songs, and her voice was so fabulous. Nick was the one who said: 'Listen to this, it's really amazing.'' When it came to making Nell Smith's own album, twentysomething sibling duo Penelope Isles were a more logical choice of creative partners. Raymonde describes the Wolters, who are signed to his label, as strong writers, producers, multi-instrumentalists 'and super-collaborators'. Not to mention nice people 'who loved Nell's music. It made [the album-making process] not stressful in the way it could have been if we'd chucked in someone so young to a scenario where they might feel a bit intimidated.' Recalling the period in spring 2023 when Nell came to Brighton to record, Lily Wolter describes 'a lot of sitting and picking apart her little brain and working out what we were going to write songs about. There was a fair to be done, but that was the best part.' Her label boss, a former musician himself (Raymonde was in Cocteau Twins), was happy for Nell to take her time, to find her voice and her footing. As he points out, 'there are lots of kids on YouTube and TikTok doing covers all day long.' But to move beyond that, to become an artist in your own right? 'The music industry has never been more volatile and peculiar than it is right now – especially if you're a young musician starting out. It's impossible to get a gauge on 'can I have a career in music?', because the model is telling you most probably no.' Jude Smith says his daughter was indeed at sixes and sevens about whether to pursue a career in music. Having finished high school a year early, 'she was having a real crisis of confidence'. So last year her parents sent her back to the UK, 'to get her feet on the ground and decide what she wanted to do next.' A two-week stay extended to six. 'She travelled around. She got into a nightclub in Leeds underage! She spent time with her grandparents and her cousins and friends from back in England. She had a great time.' On her return to Canada, a notion to study in England eventually gave way to a decision to attend Selkirk College in Nelson, British Columbia. But the music course there, says Jude, 'is quite a technical course, and she'd never studied music. And the timeframe that she had to learn music theory for the entrance exam was too short.' Nell failed the exam, so decided to start a hairdressing course last autumn, 'and her plan was to then go into the music course this year'. I ask Jude if he minds telling me the circumstances of the crash. 'Oh, man,' he says, exhaling heavily. 'Yeah, I don't mind telling you. She was on her own in the car, driving to her boyfriend's at a ridiculous time of night, on a road that was quite remote. And she rolled the car. I've been to the location, and there's just no explanation for it. I've just got a vision – there's quite a lot of animals on the road there, so maybe she saw a deer and swerved. There were no other vehicles involved. There's no one else there. She was on her own in the car. She hadn't been drinking. It's just a crazy, ridiculous tragedy. There's no explanation for it, really.' I apologise for asking. 'That's OK. Weirdly, I need to talk about this stuff with people. In a perverse way, it helps.' With the hazy, gauzy, atmospheric Anxious, Nell's voice and memory live on. Her posthumous legacy continues in other ways, too: Jude and Rachel have created the Nell Smith Memorial Fund to offer financial support to young musicians. Their aim is to raise $100,000, with annual grants of $10,000 dispensed every year for 10 years. 'And probably longer than that, because the money will get invested and it'll earn interest,' says Jude. The initiative will 'bounce between the UK and Canada… And as of this morning, we've raised $30,000.' Spiritually and financially, Nell Smith's artistry – blazing but inchoate, happening but not-yet-wholly-happening – is the gift that keeps on giving. With Anxious, and with the Fund, she's still doing what she did for that kid on holiday, or that kid at school: making people feel good. 'I think I want to do music and I want to be a musician,' Nell said in a short documentary, Stand Here, filmed around those May 2022 UK shows with The Flaming Lips and released earlier this year. 'I sometimes wish that it started a little bit later in my life. I do sometimes wish that I could just live a normal teenager life.' 'We're eternally grateful for all the gifts that she's left behind,' says her father. 'It's really, really hard because it's so raw now, but her dreams came true. And she left so much behind for people now and in the future. And there's more stuff. There's demos on this computer,' he says, gesturing to the one he's using to talk to me, 'that will probably get turned into something at some point. There's quite a lot of stuff that'll keep going. We're just focusing on her legacy and what we can do to cement that.' Listening back to the music he made with the remarkable young woman he knew for almost half of her cruelly-too-short life, Wayne Coyne can still hear 'her enthusiasm, her love, how much she cares. You can hear Nell trying. Those are all things that you want to hear in music. Sometimes there's so many overconfident people in the world! And with Nell, you get this great [sense of] – and I think she would be the first to say – 'I don't know what I'm doing… but I want to do it anyway.' That's what I would applaud.' And she did all that by the age of 15. 'Yeah. And part of her power would have been: I'm gonna keep learning. I'm gonna keep exploring. I'm gonna keep becoming. That's the part of it that's just too hard to bear. Because she's already gone.'
