The Flaming Lips Talk ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’
The Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne has looked back at the success of the band’s classic 2002 album, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in a new interview with the Independent.
Order the 5LP box set of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots: 20th Anniversary Edition HERE
Coyne spoke about the track Do You Realize??. “It’s so simple and so bizarre and quirky and emotional.” When asked about the song’s popularity as a wedding and funeral song, Coyne said, “It just didn’t occur to me that our music was ever going to be used for something so normal and so every day. If The Beatles have Yesterday, and The Flaming Lips have Do You Realize??, well, you could listen to The Beatles and find 100 more songs that are as great as Yesterday. You could listen to The Flaming Lips and find a lot of weird shit. I used to say, ‘It’s wonderful that you want to play this at your sister’s wedding. But don’t play anything else from our catalogue. That’ll clear the room pretty quick.’”
Speaking about the album as a whole, Coyne is thankful, “Those songs were given to us by the gods of music. And we happen to be the humble humans that got to be the ones that made them.”
The band waited a long time for mainstream success and Coyne reflected on the band’s reaction to fame, “Anyone who’s used to working paycheque to paycheque will know when you get a big paycheque, you’re like, ‘F**k it, let’s have fun.’ We weren’t in the mindset of ‘let’s capitalise on this and become even bigger and more popular’. Our mindset was more like, ‘Oh, good, we can have fun and no one will mess with us for a while.’”
The Flaming Lips have recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, with an expansive box set – out now on vinyl.