TORONTO - Is there a singer-musician who has more fun performing than The Flaming Lips' frontman Wayne Coyne?
On Tuesday night at the Phoenix, as the 45-year-old Coyne alternately swung a lamp over his head or tossed confetti out of his goody bag at the excited, bouncing crowd while a steady stream of large, multi-coloured balloons were thrown out from the stage, I was hard-pressed to think of one.
Oh, and Coyne was also operating a smoke machine and a streamer launcher, and had a tiny camera attached to his microphone for extreme closeups of his face -- and later a nun puppet he operated -- to be shown on the screen behind him?
At the same time, on either side of Coyne, keyboardist-guitarist Steven Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins (dressed in a skeleton costume) and touring drummer Kliph Scurlock, dancers dressed up either as Santa Claus (representing Christianity) or green-faced aliens in blue robes (Scientology) shone spotlights on the audience.
I also spotted two male roadies dressed up as a topless female superhero and Jesus.
There was so much action happening up on the Phoenix's small stage, it was hard to know where to look. (Clearly, I picked the wrong day to stop dropping acid.)
It should be pointed out too that this fun assault on the senses all happened during just the first two songs -- a wild extended intro with video and the euphoria-inducing Race For The Prize, from the band's 1999 breakthrough The Soft Bulletin.
Still to come were strobe lights, an animal noise-maker, "a battle" between the Christians and the Scientologists, and demented video of a Japanese game show where women or children with pork chops attached to their foreheads were bait for a large lizard loose on the set.
As the band's prepared video introduction proclaimed: "The Flaming Lips make the world a better place."
Everyone on stage was in a particularly good mood on Tuesday night, perhaps because earlier that day the Lips' latest album, At War With The Mystics was released.
Some 23 years after forming, this Oklahoma pop-psychedelic group has seemingly never been more popular.
As Coyne himself pointed out, the band had rarely headlined a show in Toronto before Tuesday night and said you had to go all the way back to 1995 at the Opera House.
The Lips, who could also be seen setting up their equipment alongside their roadies before the show, are an anomaly in the music business and perhaps that is why they are so beloved. That -- and they sure know how to deliver a spectacle.
Their 90-minute set included fantastic covers of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, complete with the lyrics projected on the back screen for a crowd sing-along, and the show-ending Black Sabbath's War Pigs, which was augmented by video of Bush, Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld.
But the real standouts were the Lips' own Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 from their 2002 album of the same name; their 1993 alt-rock hit, She Don't Use Jelly, introduced via a vintage clip from an appearance on Jon Stewart's show, and Do You Realize, which was preceded by a clip of Tiffany-Amber Thiessen introducing the band during their 1995 appearance on Beverly Hills 90210.
The Phoenix show sold out in nine minutes, so the really good news is that Coyne promised to return soon "to play a place that holds everybody."
