So night four of four gigs, four different venues and four different bands in five days and it’s a corker. But we go from the sublime to the ridiculous with Thursday night in a tiny basement room with a hundred other souls to the 5000 capacity Apollo tonight.
If you like confetti guns, inflatable pink robots, zorbs, lasers, massive latex balloons full of confetti, rainbows and bubble machines then this was the show for you. Theatrical doesn’t cut it and it was part wedding reception, part circus, part children’s party oh and there was a great band belting out some tunes too.
It’s the twentyish anniversary tour of landmark album ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ and so the set is split firmly in two. Playing the album straight all the way through followed by a ‘hits’ set in part two with a tasty four song encore to round things off. Whilst being a fan since the Soft Bulletin, this was my first Lips show. So appropriate that my partner tonight is an old hand Andy who had seen them ten times or so.
Each set starts with Wayne Coyne in his ‘bubble’ both literally and physically but he remains on stage throughout and isn’t tempted to roll out into the crowd. He is joined throughout sporadically at times by four huge inflatable pink robots that you will be glad to know were ultimately defeated and left the stage fully deflated from their battle.
A word to the rest of band who were excellent and kept the show moving along at a pace with little room between songs for much banter. The sound for the instruments were spot on and you could clearly hear precisely every cymbal tap for example from the twin drummers. However, the same couldn’t be said to Coyne’s vocals who despite being heavily produced felt a little muddy and imprecise and often a tad low in the mix. But it’s a small quibble for this epic show.
As described above each song is supported by blinding graphics from the massive video screens behind and I’m sure I’ll be finding bits of confetti in my clothes for days to come. Part one done we get a selection of tracks from across their back catalogue with a great cover of Madonna’s ‘Borderline’ thrown in to boot. It all ends with a magnificent four song encore with a final trilogy coming from ‘The Soft Bulletin’.
An amazing show and I’m pretty sure it won’t be beaten this year in terms of its visual splendour. Just a little shame that the vocal sound didn’t reach the same highs but a brilliant night nonetheless to break my Lips duck.
Keep on psycho pop rockin’ y’all