Within black holes, space and time as we normally perceive them come to an end. It s a disturbing thought. Stephen Hawking

INDULGE ME a moment, and try to imagine what musical score Stephen Hawking might commission in order to best evoke and/or illustrate his black hole hypotheses.
We d be talking the humming of the spheres here, Pythagoras monochord amplified to the power of quark, a noise that suggests the breaching of all spatial and temporal laws. Maybe Mr. Hawking would select something tried and tested, like Orff s Carmina Burana, or Holst s The Planets or Wagner s Ride Of The Valkyrie.
Then again, perhaps our hero would favour something a little more out-there, like one of Coleman or Coltrane s unstoppably impetuous extrapolations, a soloist zipping past his own event horizon towards an inner singularity, until the musical mass becomes too dense to maintain and the sound implodes on itself, an aural inversion of the obese dude in Monty Python s Meaning Of Life. Equally, the napalm holocaust of Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Chile might fit the bill, or maybe even a blast of Spiritualized, Primal Scream or Stereolab, providing the astrophysicist were hip to recent adventures in sky-fi.
If it were down to this writer though, I d recommend that Oklahomies The Flaming Lips produce this black hole sonata.
Why?
Well, that depends on how much time you ve got, because we re speaking in infinitives here, a head-flux where Father Time gets racked and distended like Stretch Armstrong being tug o warred by two bickering nippers. See, there s an ordeal of disfiguration which befalls objects that get sucked into black holes; their molecular make-up becomes stretched out of all recognition, a structural trauma known as spaghettification. And I can think of a good half-dozen moments throughout The Flaming Lips recorded history which seem to prescribe the spaghettification of music.
Like, for instance, God Walks Among Us Now from In A Priest Driven Ambulance ( How does it feel to be breakin apart/Breakin down molecules/How does it feel to be out of control? ); Pilot Can At The Queer Of God from Transmissions From The Satellite Heart or Psychiatric Explorations Of The Fetus With Needles from Clouds Taste Metallic.
Or indeed the entire 1997 album Zaireeka. This infamous 4-CD interactive extravaganza was designed to be played simultaneously on four hi-fi systems (an extension of bandleader Wayne Coyne s Boom Box and Parking Lot Experiments, where he combined and conducted multiple sound sources such as ghetto blasters and car stereos), disrupting the hell out of the standard listening process. Not to mention disabling the listening faculties themselves: the album s sleeve notes warn against playing track 6, How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crescendos) which features frequencies as high as 14 khz while driving, or within earshot of infants.

Since they emerged from Oklahoma City as a scuzzy, fuzzy little death-rock band some 15 years ago, psychic and physical disintegration has always been a recurring theme with The Flaming Lips. Small wonder then, that the band s publishing company is called Lovely Sorts Of Death and Wayne s portfolio of lyrics contains numerous references to moths frying themselves on the light or bugs crashing into windshields.
Theirs has been a process of slow evolution, with but one sizable quantum blip on the radar: post-Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) the band, plus longtime producer David Fridmann (who also mans the console for Mercury Rev, with whom he once played bass), forsook the replication of orchestral arrangements by way of literally thousands of guitar overdubs and went for the real thing, giving free reign to the sounds in their heads.
Consequently, from Zaireeka onwards, these pilgrims started figuring quarks, quasars and pulsars as well as Marshall amps into the equation, exploring the fifth dimension as well as the nth declension in sound, although even a song as recent as this year s Feeling Yourself Disintegrate seems to reiterate the idea that humans, like black holes themselves, are in a prolonged state of collapse. Wayne Coyne remains most preoccupied with subject matters that are not so much Big as beyond mortal comprehension.
Some of these big things, people think about them for a while and then decide, Well I don t know the answer, and they move on, the singer begins, speaking in grizzled tones that sound little like his singing voice, but I don t.
It s late August 1999, and we re backstage on the afternoon of The Flaming Lips Transmissions performance at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Time is of the essence, but that s okay: Wayne talks at the speed of light.
I persist and I persist, he continues, and I can keep on a theme, just trying to profoundly understand what those things are, for years and years. And so I think I ve been lucky that some of the things I ve latched onto like love and death and trying to understand the universe and stuff like that are things that you can spend years thinkin about without really feeling you re running up against the wall.
These themes have reached their apogee on The Soft Bulletin, the band s latest and greatest studio album. And without doing disservice to one of the most fascinating canons of work in the last 15 years of rock n roll, it does seem as if they ve passed through a wormhole and emerged on the other side of a whole other musical universe, blinking, dazed and transfigured. TSB is a masterpiece of impossibly lush pop, built on a Cecil B De Spector scale, depicting monumental struggles between good and evil, love and death, science and disease, reality and surreality.
This latest opus seems to anthologise every 20th century style known to man or alien: celestial choirs of autoharps, flugel horns, mellotrons, kettle drums, cellos, loops, scraps of soundtracks, astral tangos, super-bossa-novas, cosmic rococo, baroque spacerock.
And in terms of creating its own timespace continuum, of inventing its own sonic and lyrical dialect(ic), The Soft Bulletin is a natural successor to records like The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Electric Ladyland, Marquee Moon, Daydream Nation, Screamadelica, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating Into Space, Moon Safari and of course, Mercury Rev s Deserter s Songs (Jonathan Donahue was a key member of the band for the In A Priest Driven Ambulance and Hit To Death In The Future Head albums).
Titles like Race For The Prize , The Spark That Bled , Suddenly Everything Has Changed and The Gash are not so much songs as cinemascopic symphonies, paranoid epics built around brief moments of beatitude, using everyday occurrences as points of departure ( Putting all the clothes you washed away ), then making lateral jumps into the realms of dream, delusion and even dementia. But in order to transpose Coyne s fantastical imaginings into a musical language, one imagines that fellow Lips Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins, plus David Fridmann, had to put in some long hours of damnably hard work.
It s not hard, Fridmann avers, on the phone from his studio near Buffalo in New York state, where The Soft Bulletin and Deserter s Songs were recorded concurrently.
Nobody gets killed and there s no blood drawn and nobody dies if we screw it up, the producer elaborates, but it s great fun, it s like building something out of Lego. One time when we were working on The Gash very early on, Stephen had this shred of a musical idea in his head, and we were trying to realise it, orchestrating and running all these parts around and we probably had like 20, 24 tracks already filled up with stuff, trying to sort it out.
And suddenly, we heard something with what we were doing and we both just literally ran out of the room screaming, not scared for our lives, but at the horrible music that we had turned it into. It was the worst thing we had ever heard! I managed to hit stop on the tape deck before we just ran like hell. And we couldn t go back in the room for a couple of hours, we just had to have some dinner to clear the air. But in the long run, The Gash is certainly one of my favourites, I m really pleased with how it turned out.

Back at the Olympia, we re talkin Hawking. Wayne is split by an obvious admiration of the visionary s intellect, but a keen awareness of the restrictions of the human brain itself, the innate inability to fully comprehend the Big Bang, life, the multiverse and everything.
I feel like he must have some understanding of that stuff, he concedes, but on some other level, I don t know how anybody could truly understand. Y know, everybody always goes back to the idea of the birth of the universe: How d this stuff get here? Do things just appear someday? And you know, there probably is some way to understand it, I just haven t been able to get to where you can actually comprehend how the universe came to be from . . . what? Was this stuff just always here?
Coyne once said of his band s music: Somewhere in there, people are drawn to the element of childlike images. It borders on being retarded in some ways. Nowhere is such bed-headed wonder more evident than in Placebo Headwound from Clouds Taste Metallic, with its refrain of Where does outer space end?/It s sort of hard to imagine . . . Here, Coyne suggests an infantile struggle to comprehend the infinite, that funny, elasticated feeling you get when your brain tries to grasp a concept of colossal magnitude. In short, spaghettification.
Oh, totally! he exclaims. You know, I still feel that. When I truly go to think about stuff like infinity, I sometimes feel as if I hit the ceiling of my own capability of understanding. I feel like, Here we go! and then there s, Boom! I just hit it. It does feel like your brain is stretching and it can t find the solution and goes, Oh, where is the answer?
You think back, y know, 500 years ago, and those sorts of things were probably just: We don t understand it that must be what the universe and God and all that is, it s beyond our understanding, let s just get on with our life. But nowadays you do have a lot of time where you can sit there and just think about it and want to understand it. And I don t believe we can. I mean, maybe in a scientific way you can put this abstract concept into numbers, but I think to truly understand infinity and stuff like that, I just don t think it is part of our realisable faculties. Because it doesn t actually help you at all, to understand that things don t end.

And so, to The Show. The Flaming Lips live in 1999 represent a kind of vaudeville for the bewildered, a PT Barnum revival for insane alien abductees, purveying a skewed combination of high-tech and gimcrack, as if a bunch of homeless scavengers got their hands on some NASA scrap and turned it into performance art or aural sculpture.
Shortly after the release of The Soft Bulletin, Coyne entertained the fantasy of putting on a stadium show where the stage hydraulically advances into a 100,000-strong crowd until they re all crushed to death. He was joking of course, but nevertheless, the Lips live experience is pure brinkmanship. Not once during their Olympia performance did this voyeur feel entirely comfortable the whole rite reeked of the kind of gaudy theatre practised by Neil Young on the Tonight s The Night tour, or one of Tom Waits more macabre pantos.
Some of this is down to the images blaring from the big screen: the absence of a flesh-and-blood drummer is compensated for by a 2D image of Drozd playing the album tracks from a one-shot vantage in a rehearsal space; there s footage of nuclear explosions ( Race For The Prize ); disembodied smiles hovering down the road ( When You Smile ); pulsating hearts ( Thirty Five Thousand Feet Of Despair ); Leonard Bernstein ( The Spark That Bled ); and, mercilessly looped, the famous clip of a Vietnamese prisoner being executed ( The Gash ).
And presiding over all this is Wayne, using his gong-beater as a bandleader s baton and enlightening-conductor, dressed like a cross between a demobbed military boffin and a confederate general gone native. The druggy hair of yore is now swept back exposing a handsome, bearded face, over which he cracks vials of fake blood, leers into the fisheye camera mounted on the mic stand, ventriloquises through a succession of glove-puppets (sharks, nuns, dogs), and scatters confetti all over the stage.
In performance, Coyne embodies the archetypal crank shaman, the fast-talking shuckster, the last 20th century header at the end of a long line of crazies like Harry Smith, Harry Partch, Sun Ra, Lee Perry, Neil, Syd, Tom, Roky and The Aphex Twin. It d take both Ken Kesey and David Mamet to write this guy, not that he d thank me for talking in such empurpled terms. Backstage, he amicably shrugs off that ol holy madman shtick:
They throw it at me a lot, he admits, creativity and being a madman or drug-damaged or all that sort of stuff where you think madmen are the only ones that know the answers. (But) you wouldn t want drug-damaged madmen building your buildings downtown, or running your sewer systems, or designing airplanes, and all those things take a lot of imagination and creativity, it s just that no-one wants to pay any attention to it because it s not sexy, they don t wear weird clothes or whatever, a scientist or a teacher or someone like that. Even Einstein said that if he had to pick between imagination and knowledge, he would pick imagination as being more of a powerful tool.
When I put it to David Fridmann that it must be difficult to stay focused on a record as complex as The Soft Bulletin with a brainstormer like Wayne around, he says this:
It s certainly hardest on him. I can get lost in like, chopping up loops or whatever, but he s still got to keep more of an angle on the big picture than anybody. Some recording days are just like discussion days and we ll get out reference books and start exploring the realms of quarks as they pass through ether, y know, and then tying that back in. We re talking about the song, but we have to make sure the physics of it are correct before we get into it, so we have to do the research first.
We spent like, three days probably more like three weeks really, before it was done talking about, What colour do you see when you look up? Wayne would maintain that you see black. And I was saying, Well, you re not really seeing any colour because there s no reflection of any light, and you just get into these arguments that go on and on and on. And I m not sure either one of us was right, but, y know, (we re) just trying to figure out how people see things and why. And that s where it gets complicated, I think. We can talk about a coca-cola bottle for four days and somehow end up relating it back to life on the planet.
Scatologist or scientist, there s no doubting that Coyne is the one steering the Flaming Lips ship. Wayne likes to be there all the time, one member of Warners International told the domestic department before the band s Irish visit. Fellow surrealist and Warner Bros act Robyn Hitchcock, who toured America with the Lips last summer, offers a final insight into the singer s character:
I think Wayne s a real dominance-and-submission guy, he concludes. He s a Capricorn, one of those lone conquerors, y know, sort of, Let s go and do the long march . He drove his bus right the way around America one and a half times on that tour. He d get up at six in the morning, drive for 400 miles, set the gear up, MC all the bands, do his own show, put the gear away and that was it.
Towards the end of the tour he had a little Bourbon, but the guy s energy is phenomenal. I kind of admire him. He can be a bit of a bully sometimes, he tries to antagonise people, but we both do what we want to do and we re probably both kind of maverick. Julian Cope s another figure like that. I know my mind runs fast and I know Julian s does and probably Wayne s does. There were probably the same parenting deficiencies with all of us in some way! n
The Soft Bulletin and the single Waitin For A Superman are out now on Warner Music.