Life On Mars: The Flaming Lips

In conversation Coyne seems mystified by this at times, but speaks openly about how he'd like his work to be interpreted. “I want the audience to put their own experiences to it, I prefer it when the listener is open to the meanings and can then colour it with their own experiences. When we were doing 'Do You Realize,' there was no way we could have imagined what it was to become. When I first played it to Steven, he simply thought of it as a stereotypical Wayne line, a classic Flaming Lips song. But writing it is only half the job, and once your song's done it's up to the world what they do with it. Even if nobody had ever listened to it I’d still be happy that we did it.”

It's easy to question such statements in light of the obvious success of recent years. Lesser bands, or indeed people, would have crumbled under the pressures that The Flaming Lips have endured. The making and release of this film is more than just the culmination of the continued desire to express oneself, coupled with the level of freedom achieved by writing Grammy Award winning songs. It's part of a journey which has at times seemed destined to abruptly end, and one that Coyne is happy to elaborate on.

“Bad things will happen that you think should destroy you, and sometimes they give you a morale resolve to say, ‘Fuck it, I know I’m doing this for myself.’ Sometimes failure encourages you more, as success is a very strange thing because you don’t know what it means or where it’s gonna go. I don’t know if I could speak for everyone, but after ‘She Don't Use Jelly’ (1993's breakthrough single) we did all think, ‘Now what do we do?’ To which we said, 'Lets just be in a group and see what happens.' We were never trying to be the biggest group in the world, but  it helped that it did happen to us when we were older, as if we’d been 22 it would have been very different.”

“But we love making music and being the Flaming Lips, and we know that we like it and it’s what we like to do. I know of three or four different times where we didn’t know what was gonna happen, like in 2001 when Steven was at the height of his heroin addiction, right when we started shooting this film, I half expected to wake up in the morning to a phone call saying that he’d died of an overdose. You don’t know what you’d do in the aftermath of that. Would it be too difficult to throw his body overboard and keep on trudging along, or does it affect you so much that you can’t conceive the idea of those same identities moving ahead in the same way? I know that we’ve been utterly lucky, that at times when it's seemed like it isn’t gonna work out, it becomes better than we could ever have dreamed.”

There's no denying the truth to these sentiments. They are said with such conviction that it's impossible to doubt the man's integrity, especially in light of the events that have threatened the bands existence through the years. The film may not offer any insights into the reality of The Flaming Lips to the same level of 2005's documentary 'The Fearless Freaks,' but as an insight into The Flaming Lips' subconscious as it splashes out across your TV screen in glorious Technicolor, it must surely be worth some investigation.