Do You Realize??

Blimey I'm tired.

I suspect that it was some kind of beautiful accident which got The Flaming Lips booked into the 1,000 capacity Tramshed last night. The gig sold out in an hour, and it's the busiest I've ever seen the venue, and lordy lord it was hot, it was disco hot.

I have a lot of history with the Flaming Lips and are probably one of the only bands I've seen in multiple countries. I've lost count of how may times I've seen them. The first time was at a Glastonbury in 1999 (?) with Grumpy Gareth at the other stage. The set had fake blood, nun glove puppets, basically everything you'd want from a gig.

Last night after some technical difficulties they were straight out of the traps with 'Racing for the Price' and proceeded to open the full visual onslaught that they're known for. It felt like they started the show with an encore. That level of euphoria couldn't be maintained for the entire gig but it came pretty damn close. The set relied pretty heavily on 'Soft Bulletin' and 'Yoshimi' which is no bad thing, they have been pretty much been doing the same set for the last five years, which I'm not complaining about, I'm pretty sure I've seen Wayne Coyne zorbing across the crowd while singing 'Space Oddity' before, I definitely haven't seen him ride a unicorn while wearing rainbow wings before. Coyne did mention that they pretty much hadn't changed the stage set they use for an enormo-festival stage and it was even more impressive in The Tramshed. 

There were a lot of phones out for the Lips zany antics, but I managed to stay in the moment and leave my phone in my pocket, I nicked the photo above from a friend's Instragram feed. It was a proper old school sweaty gig, both Sian and I were drenched when we left. I loved the gig, it was just sheer joy which was topped off with an inflatable rainbow (of course) and 'Do You Realize??'. A gig to lift your soul and make you smile.