Wayne Coyne: Weird for sound

They may be odd, but the Flaming Lips happen to be the most inventive band on the planet. Fiona Sturges meets their surprisingly normal lead singer

Wayne Coyne is covered in blood. It's dripping from his hair, trickling down his neck and spreading across his shirt. Behind him, a pink and white rabbit strides past carrying a guitar. The rabbit is followed by a frog, and the frog by a bear. Welcome to the peculiar world of the Flaming Lips.

It's the first day of their British tour and Coyne, the singer and driving force behind the band, is in a state of intense excitement. He and his band – Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins – are experimenting with some new toys, among them confetti-filled balloons and two giant mirror balls which, rather than hanging from the ceiling, will be revolving on a pair of stripped down cement mixers shipped over from their home town of Oklahoma. Having ensured that the mirror balls are twirling nicely, Coyne gets back to the task of smearing himself in fake blood. "Jeez, this stuff gets everywhere," he says, staring at a puddle at his feet, hooting with laughter.

There isn't a band in existence that can match the Flaming Lips in terms of wit, invention or downright weirdness. This is a group that incorporate sirens, megaphones, confetti, fake blood and glove puppets into their shows. One notorious gig was the Parking Lot Experiment, where Coyne wired up a series of car stereos in an underground car park in order to create a single piece of music. Boom Box Experiment, in 1998, saw them orchestrating a sea of cassette recorders containing pre-recorded Flaming Lips tracks. The experiment yielded a four-CD album, Zaireeka, the constituent parts of which were designed to be played simultaneously.

Their songs, which come with such gobbledygook titles as "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" and "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles," similarly transport you to a dark world of make-believe. It's a world where, in the case of their new album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a martial arts fighter named Yoshimi is locked in gladiatorial combat with an army of evil robots. Such wild flights of fancy are commonplace for Coyne. It's his febrile imagination that has sustained the Flaming Lips since the early Eighties, chipping away at conventional recording methods and fanatically pursuing new sounds and ideas.

Yet, despite appearances to the contrary – the fake blood has dried now, leaving the singer looking even more bruised and sinister – Coyne would like it to be known that he is entirely sound of mind. Throughout the years, he and his band have been dogged by rumours of instability and all-out insanity. "I have a wife, a house and dogs," he insists with a broad grin. "I eat food, I sleep at night, I do all the things that other people do. My dark days are regular dark days that everyone has. My life really is very normal and stable. I think that's why my imagination can really soar."

Still, Coyne admits a degree of responsibility for some of more outlandish myths. "We told some horrible lies about how many drugs we were taking in the early years. I think we were more of a freak show than a proper band. It's true that some guys in the band were taking drugs. But we were around people who would think nothing of dropping 10 acid tabs in a night. We weren't really into that."

In fact, Coyne, now 41, doesn't drink and hasn't taken acid since his teens. Even then, he says, he didn't enjoy it: "My acid experiences were these fearful hell rides where everything that could be bad about death and suicide and self-reflection were amplified to the point of absolute horror. The last time I took it was in 1978. I remember going out to get some breakfast at one of those drive-thru burger bars. I pulled up at this window and realised that it had been shattered. There was all this fresh blood dripping over the windows and a guy with a rag all soaked in blood trying to wipe them down. He just took my order from around the other side. I was thinking, 'I'm either dying here or I'm going insane'. I knew then that tripping wasn't for me."

For the Flaming Lips, the majority of the Eighties was spent slogging around the college circuit and fuelling the already rampant rumours regarding their drug intake. It wasn't until they signed to Warner Brothers in 1991, when they were given proper financial support, that the band's experimental disposition really came to the fore. Hit to Death in the Future Head, Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, Clouds Taste Metallic, and Zaireeka were glorious excursions into the core of Coyne's imagination. Yet even with the backing of a major label, the band seemed destined to reside on the outer fringes of American rock. Aside from an unexpected US hit in 1993 with "She Don't Use Jelly", a song about a woman who breakfasts on Vaseline, they never troubled the charts. But then came 1999's The Soft Bulletin, which sold 350,000 copies and earned them places in every critic's end-of-year polls. As well as being their most accessible work in years, it was also their most melodic, swapping the layers of distortion with swirling symphonic sounds and fully-formed songs.

"I don't think people expected that kind of music from us," ponders Coyne. "I thought that at the time we were making it we were going for a weirder sound. Rather than playing with noisy guitars and writing those sick fairy-tale songs, I thought doing that more bombastic stuff would have been further to the left. But it seemed to be more emotional and real to people,"

Yoshimi treads a similar path. Like its predecessor, it's a work of boldness and breathtaking originality. Never one to shy away from grand themes, Coyne tackles issues of death, fear and our place in the universe. "We do like going down that grave road," Coyne remarks cheerfully. "I like the idea of death to never really leave me. I know that probably sounds ridiculous, but I just want to always be reminded of how temporary our time is."

Coming from anyone else, such a statement would be alarming, but from Coyne it's oddly touching. His work may have a dark undertow, but he is upbeat and enthusiastic. His conversation is punctured by exclamations of "gosh" and "wow" at such simple notions as people playing his records. When I ask if he's tempted to do a stylistic about-turn and plunge the band back into obscurity he shakes his head.

"We'd be fools to go against the grain just because we think we should. We go in and we make Flaming Lips music. It's not like we think to ourselves 'Let's make a commercial record' or 'Why don't we be weird for weird's sake.' But, you know, I can see why people think I'm on drugs. I'm sitting here covered in blood and I've got people next door dressed up as rabbits. But I've always wanted music to be this kaleidoscopic experience. I just like there to be freaky shit going on."

'Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' is out on Warner Brothers on Monday.