Pynchon

Hi Gang! I'm back!

Last night I went to see The Flaming Lips.



First a word on the support act, a trio that called themselves Deerhoof. Actually I will give you a couple of words.

Shit. Terrible. Awful. Lamentable. Crap. Diabolical. Terrible. Dreadful. Shocking. Appalling. Horrible. Gruesome. Harrowing. Distressing. (I've bought myself a dictionary/thesaurus with the intention of trying to improve my vocabulary. I am well aware that I use the same words and phrases over and over again.)

It's quite an achievement. On and off I've been going to gigs for 28 years and Deerhoof were probably the worst band I have ever seen live.

Hypnotically bad. Deerhoof played some kind of godawful mismatch of art rock/jazz/noise improvisation wank. No tunes. No lyrics. Bad, very bad. How bad? Beyond bad. Maybe it's me? Maybe it was some kind of fucked up performance art and I'm not intelligent enough to get it?

Deerhoof got a relatively good reaction from the Flaming Lips audience. Well, at least nobody booed. (They got a better reaction than the string quartet that supported the Pet Shop Boys on their second British tour. That night things were being thrown at the stage by the audience.) I wanted to boo. I wanted to throw things.

I'll give them one thing. Their drummer was great. Obviously a student of the Stewart Copeland/Mick Fleetwood school of drumming. He was 9 foot tall and gangly with it. His drumkit was tiny. (I bought my nephew one like it when my nephew was 2 years old.)

Deerhoof. I don't think that they will be troubling the charts very soon. Good luck to them.

In comparison, The Flaming Lips were just fab. It's the second time I've seen them and they should give lessons in how to stage an entertaining gig. It was like the greatest grown up kids party in the whole world. Where else would you get balloons, streamers, laser beams, smoke machines, dancing Marvel comic characters, dancing Santa Claus', a multitude of Alien ladies, giant heads, weird films and lead singer Wayne Coyle walking over the heads of the audience in a clear plastic ball? (Actually the clear plastic ball thing I've seen before at a Peter Gabriel gig, but it was still pretty cool.)

Musically they were pretty shambolic, but it hardly mattered. They were fun and mad and ridiculous and played everything that I wanted to hear. ("Fight Test", "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1", "Vaseline", "Do You Realise?" - officially one of the most moving songs of all time - "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", etc.) The encore was a cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (with the words on a giant screen so that you could sing along - I was magnificent) and something I had never heard before.

Well worth it. Great gig. I'll definitely be seeing them again.