Wayne Coyne Says the Flaming Lips Will Play a Concert to Audience in Bubbles

The Flaming Lips are planning a concert where the audience will be in bubbles, frontman Wayne Coyne has told Brooklyn Vegan and JamBase. “I mean, it seems absurd, but we at first were just doing it as not a joke, but just as a kind of funny thing, and now it’s becoming kind of serious and real,” Coyne said to BrooklynVegan’s Bill Pearis. “We’re starting to get ready to do an actual show where, yeah, there’s three people in each of these space bubbles, and we play… we think maybe playing two shows a night, and getting a big audience in there each time.”

According to BrooklynVegan, the Lips’ bubble show will take place in their hometown of Oklahoma City. When reached by Pitchfork, a representative for the band offered no comment.

Speaking with Andrew Buss for JamBase, Wayne Coyne said:

We, the Flaming Lips, already know how to do space bubbles and we know what people do when they’re in the bubbles. The part that we’re trying to get down is what does the crowd do about going to the bathroom and getting drinks? We don’t want this to be [a super spreader event] like that Smash Mouth [concert]. We want this to be safe and a great experience. Those are the things the venue is allowing us to set up so we can start to figure out how it will work. The part about playing in the bubble, we already have down. It’s how we get the crowd in and out without cross-contamination that we need to figure out, but they’re giving us a few weeks in this venue to figure it out. We’re thinking this will probably happen after the election.

In a September Fallon performance of “God and the Policeman,” off their new album American Head, each member of the Flaming Lips played from their own individual bubble.