‘They Punctured My Yolk’: The Flaming Lips track Wayne Coyne wants to remake
The Flaming Lips have never been shy about trying on new sounds or styles, forging into new directions, and conquering new frontiers. Founded in 1983, the group have continuously and restlessly evolved over the years.
Experimenting with psychedelic sounds, avant-garde or electronic elements, studio techniques, and pushing their instruments to the limits of what you could expect from guitars, bass, drums, and voices, they are sonic explorers and adventurers of the first degree. Imbuing their ingenious music with philosophical and poetic lyrics, they are a band that can expand your horizons and open up your mind.
Their live shows open your eyes and your heart and are always a joyous experience. A masterclass in showmanship and theatricality, frontman Wayne Coyne can often be found singing inside a giant zorb ball and walking across the ocean of raised hands of his audience. Their stages are always awash with brightly coloured inflatable rainbows, light shows, balloons, confetti, and costumed characters.
All of these only enhance the ability to experience their music. Their songs might feel far out on their records, but it’s on the stage where they really come alive. You haven’t truly heard ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’, ‘Do You Realize ??’ or ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt 1’ until you’ve heard Wayne Coyne and co doing them in person.
For one song in particular, Coyne felt similarly. During an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of their critically acclaimed 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic, Coyne was asked if he had a least favourite song from the record. Of the album’s 13 songs, the singer selected ‘They Punctured My Yolk’ but went on to explain how revisiting the song in concert 20 years later changed the way the band felt about it. Though the group have continuously toured over the years, they didn’t perform this particular song at any of their shows until they marked the anniversary of the album with a late February concert at the Iron City in Birmingham, Alabama.
“When we went to play it at the Clouds Taste Metallic show in February, it [became] one of our favourites after we changed the arrangement,” he explained. “It was still that song but just a more fun, dynamic arrangement. It turned out to be probably the highlight of the night, to tell you the truth. The song that we didn’t like, we changed it to something that we absolutely like.”
Where on the album, the song is a crawling dirge-like drift of noise, drums and distortion, on stage it became a powerful blast of cinematic expanse, a sprawling mass of noise which expanded rather than contracted, as it had done on the album. “Though we’re in zero gravity”, Coyne sings, “It pulled us closer”, and this arrangement perfectly embodies the sentiment.
To further highlight this explosion of time and space within the song and to send us off to the stars, a giant inflatable space suit drifts behind Coyne throughout the song. The Flaming Lips might have wished they could redo ‘They Punctured My Yolk’ for their album Clouds Taste Metallic, but they got the chance to reinvent, reimagine and reanimate it on stage, though they only returned to it a further four times since.
