“I don’t really like taking drugs,” he admits. “Well, I think probably as much as we can know, the first Syd Barrett album, but I don’t know if that was when he was really taking drugs or whether it was what opened his mind up to be able to take drugs. There have been a lot of coincidences of people taking drugs and making great albums, but I bet if you went scientifically down the line and said, ‘Let’s take all the records made by people who have taken drugs while they were making records’, I think it would probably be 50 billion to three – most of them don’t work.”ĭoes he have a favourite instance where the drugs did work? “Ha ha, um, not any that would be intentionally trying to explode our creativity or take us to another realm,” he says. “But what I do I do because I like to do”: Coyne and co channel A Clockwork Orange Were any pharmaceuticals consumed in the making of this product? But Oczy Mlody really does seem quite druggy. Coyne is largely a non-partaker out of a family of known caners (his older brother is a long-term heroin addict), while Lips multi-instrumentalist and the musical brains of the operation Steven Drozd is shown in 2005’s The Fearless Freaks documentary shooting up. A track from the new album such as Listening To The Frogs With Demon Eyes blends the Disney-esque fantasias of Bulletin/Yoshimi with the bleaker atmospheres of predecessor The Terror (2013).
Oczy Mlody is a relatively light affair, one speckled with optimism, even if there are undercurrents of menace. Is the “future fairytale” concept also a pathway to a deeper meaning? “It’s about the idea that indulgence is the saviour,” he offers. On The Flaming Lips’ two commercial breakthroughs – The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (2002) – Coyne used songs about science, war and spider bites to inveigle messages about love and death. That’s when I really woke up to the idea of this as a fairytale from the future.” “And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s what we wanna do.’ I like the idea that if we’re excited about something, maybe you’ll be excited about it, too.
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“He was full of energy, like an excited child you’re seeing how cool this stuff is through him,” he relates. He spent the evening recently at an art gallery with Damien Hirst and was particularly gratified by the artist’s childlike glee as he dashed around the exhibits, touching everything in sight. “I guess druggy music for adults who still have the potential to be childlike and excited.” Is Oczy (with its intimations of opiates, via oxycodone) Mlody druggy music for kids, or a kids’ album for adult spliffheads? Coyne laughs. So I thought, ‘I’m really gonna sing about unicorns and rainbows and yet I know it can be interpreted as something else and I’m just gonna do it.’ That was a great breakthrough.” “I would never sing about a dragon and mean it to be marijuana – a lot of people would – but people like that about music. “A lot of people would come to that song because they thought it was a reference to smoking pot, but I came to it when I was five years old because I thought it was about a dragon,” he explains. The Odd Couple: Coyne and Steven Drozd (right) And that’s not even mentioning the frogs and wizards… And all these decadent shenanigans are meant to take place inside “a gated community that has been made into a replicant fantasy city where the mega-mega rich folks live and have self-indulgent psycho parties where everyone takes the drug and has sex followed by painful emotional therapy sessions where every primal desire is allowed and encouraged while riding unicorns”.
One suggestion is that it’s the name of “the current cool powerful party drug of choice”, designed to “send you into the deepest slumber during which you’re able to sleep off withdrawals and cravings and wake up sober”. A mood that might find him at any moment discussing the proximity of his band The Flaming Lips’ latest music, as featured on 15th album Oczy Mlody, to the sound of rapper A$AP Rocky and original psychedelicat Syd Barrett “getting trapped in a fairytale from the future”, or perhaps detailing the various possible meanings of the LP title. That is to say, playful and prone to mercurial flights of fancy that Lewis Carroll might consider far-fetched. Wayne Coyne is in a distinctly Wayne Coyne-ish mood.