The Flaming Lips are set to appear on "VH1 Rock Honors" tribute to the Who on July 17th. The band appears to be ready to rock like it's 1995 in this video of a recent rehearsal for the event with an inspired performance of a Tommy medley.
We haven't seen the Lips sans backing tracks, confetti, dancing animals and other such spectacles in over a decade and this is an excellent return to form. None of this means the band won't pull all the usual stops for the actual taping, but this intimate footage of them in their rehearsal space can't help but to excite longtime fans. See them, feel them:
In other Lips news, Wayne Coyne tells Billboard that the band is working on new material for its At War With the Mystics follow-up saying it sounds "something like if John Lennon got together with Miles Davis and they discovered computers." "Sometimes, there's an element of song structure that me and [band member] Steven [Drozd] get really bored of," he continues. "But you can play certain things and the computer f*cks with them in a way where it's like, 'Oh, I didn't think of that before.' Even as we speak I get excited. I'm thinking, 'F*ck! This is going to be cool!'"
Coyne adds that the material has inadvertently taken on a kind of uplifting tone in the early going. "I'd never want to make it sound like 'Imagine,' but some of these songs accidentally fall into that category," he says. "We never want to feel like we've got the answers to the world, while we're quietly going insane on our own level."
