For most bands, a stage is a stage. The crew
will hang curtains and lights and set up the monitors, and the band will play a show. Then they’ll take everything down and repeat it all in the next city.
The Flaming Lips, however, are not most bands.
“The UFO is definitely big,” said Michael Ivins, the Flaming Lips bassist known for dressing up in a full-body skeleton jumpsuit. “The punch line is that we were talking about a bigger one.”
You heard right. The Flaming Lips, the goofy yet important space-rock trio from Oklahoma long known for its uniquely cartoonish stage shows, is bringing a UFO to Red Rocks Saturday for its headlining date at the Monolith Festival. It’s an imposing UFO, one that descends to the stage and ostensibly transports Ivins, frontman Wayne Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd from outer space to a rock show. It’s so large that only certain stages can handle its epic girth and massive weight.
And yes, it is as striking as it sounds – with a little suspension of disbelief, of course.
Touring with a gigantic UFO might seem crazy – but only to those who aren’t familiar with the Flaming Lips, whose shows are notorious for involving multiple confetti cannons, audience members dressed up in super hero or animal or Santa costumes, smoke machine-enabled megaphones, dozens of handheld spotlights, singing nun puppets, faux hemorrhaging head wounds, self-playing trumpets and singer Coyne in a giant clear-plastic space bubble that he uses to walk and crawl across the audience’s outstretched hands.
“In a lot of ways, the space bubble – and the fact that we call it a space bubble, because that’s certainly not what it’s called – gives our shows some element of weirdness,” said Ivins of the unbridled joy that makes up a Flaming Lips show.
It’s an adult playground – or a really bizarre Cirque du Soleil gig set to killer music – created for the band as much as the fans. And it’s this dedication that has made the Flaming Lips one of the most moving live acts in the world. The band is a festival favorite, and so it makes sense it’s headlining the second day of Monolith, the first-ever multiday festival to take over Red Rocks. Also on the bill are Spoon, Cake, the Decemberists, Kings of Leon, Art Brut, Cloud Cult, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Editors and more than 40 other bands. The full schedule and line-up can be found at .
“We’ve always really liked and admired the European festivals that have these traditions of decades and decades, and over there it seems to be a part of growing up and rock ‘n’ roll, and that sort of stuff,” said Ivins, a founding member of the Flaming Lips, which started playing shows nearly 25 years ago.
“America seems to have finally caught on in the last 10 years, and now it’s great that a lot of American cities and towns are starting to do these and thrive, because a lot of the people who go to these things are actually just music lovers, and what more could you want than to play in front of people who love music?”
The band is constantly pushing the boundaries of performance and asking the question, “Just how much confetti can we unleash on a crowd?” But their set lists rarely vary from a generally standardized form. You’ll hear the new jams “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and “Free Radicals” and old favorites “Do You Realize,” “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “Race For the Prize,” “Fight Test” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” But rarely does the band unleash multiple B-sides or album tracks in any given show.
“We’ve always been of the philosophy that when people come and see a band, they’re generally, on the whole, coming to see songs that they’re familiar with, which is usually the answer of why we don’t play any old, old songs, because a lot of people don’t really know them,” Ivins said. “It doesn’t fit into how we feel a good show is put on. That’s why we do play a lot of songs that people know and like. We don’t get tired of them. People ask, ‘Do you still like playing “She Don’t Use Jelly,” and we’re like, ‘Well, we wrote them, and we wouldn’t play them if we didn’t like them.”‘
As bizarre as the Flaming Lips are, their fans are right up there with them, dressing up and singing along and losing themselves in the magic realism that is a Flaming Lips show. They’re like “Star Trek” nerds, only for spacey indie rock instead of poorly acted sci-fi TV.
“We are incredibly lucky that we have such fans who are willing to let go,” Ivins said, seconding the fan appreciation Coyne spreads with each performance. “I mean, the UFO is basically a lighting truss, and it’s sitting on top of the rafters, and we lower it down and we get out of it. But there’s an element of a movie there where, if you suspend your disbelief for a tiny fraction of a second, it does have that element of this magical experience. And our fans totally go along with that, which is great, because most bands’ fans probably wouldn’t.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Monolith Festival
INDIE ROCK|Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison; gates open at 3 p.m. today, 2 p.m. Saturday|Featuring 50-plus bands including the Flaming Lips, Spoon, Cake, the Decemberists, Kings of Leon, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Cloud Cult, Ghostland Observatory and many others on five stages. Full lineup, schedule at
|$42.50 per day; $79.50 per two-day pass|ticketmaster.com, 303-830-8497
Here are 10 acts not to miss at this weekend’s Monolith Festival at Red Rocks – five playing today, and five playing Saturday.
TODAY
The Decemberists: Literate, anachronistic indie pop as biting as it is pretty. 8:30 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Bouncy indie rock that makes you wiggle. 5:45 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Ghostland Observatory: Disco’s hardly dead. It lives strong in these kids from Austin. 4:30 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Flosstradamus/Kid Sister: The latest in the DJ movement turning hip-hop on its head, these Chicago DJs and MC know how to
work a room. 10:30 p.m., Stage
Ian Cooke: One of Denver’s greatest songwriting talents works alone with a cello. 4 p.m., Songwriter Stage
SATURDAY
The Flaming Lips (pictured above right): Live music rarely gets better than this spectacle. 10 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Spoon: Are you ga-ga over the new Spoon LP “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”? We are too. 8:30 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s: We haven’t heard much from this band in a while, but its “The Dust of Retreat” remains close to our heart. 4:30 p.m., Esurance Main Stage
Cloud Cult: “The Meaning of 8” is one of the most important records of the year. And this has the potential of being Monolith’s most moving set. 9:30 p.m., New Belgium Stage
Earl Greyhound: Listening to Earl Greyhound shred is like, “O, yeah – that’s what rock ‘n’ roll sounds like.” 7:45 p.m., New Belgium Stage
– Ricardo Baca
