Tag: flaming lips

YBTPR – 6Music session

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As heard this morning on Radcliffe & Maconie. A beautiful, acoustic version of a beautiful song.

This recorded for 6Music back in July 2002, I believe. I saw The Flaming Lips twice the following year: once at Glastonbury, and then once later in the year (November, Google tells me) at the Hammersmith Apollo, where he began the gig with 7 Nation Army and ended it with White Christmas delivered through a loudhailer.

Halcyon days.

Weirdly, on that second occasion, Wayne Coyne told us it was the biggest audience he’d ever played in front of. He must have been as high as a kite to have forgotten the 90,000+ in front of the Pyramid Stage just a few months before.

Euphoric

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Mark Radcliffe described this song as “incredibly euphoric”, when he played it yesterday morning.

Which, for a song which contains the line:

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

in its first verse, seems quite a stretch.

But it surely is the one of the most positive, thought-provoking songs ever written. Sure, there’s the nod to our unavoidable individual mortalities, but rather than dwelling on them, we’re told to fill the intervening period – however long that may be – with optimism, happiness and love.

It’s a fantastic idea that virtually no-one has adopted, perhaps for the convenient  reason that you’d look really rather weird being cheerful given the current state of the country and the world in general.

But then, maybe the state of the country and the world in general could be positively affected by people being… well… more positive.
Maybe it’s worth giving it a try.

 

No. You first.