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Ye olde Flaming Lips rock and roll blasts.
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Between 1984 and 1988, the Flaming Lips' live performances were primarily about bombast, excitement, and putting on a good, fun, rock and roll show. As well as their own freakout classics, they would always play other people's songs that they loved (and were somewhat infamous for playing Led Zeppelin songs for a while - remember that this wasn't necessarily very 'cool' around then...). They also had something of a pencant for goofy stage effects including smoke machines, old projectors, incendiaries, and various cheap lighting gimmicks.
In 1988, while they were between drummers, Wayne and Michael played a few fairly introspective shows on their own - this was on the tour to promote Telepathic Surgery. Soon after Nathan Roberts came in to hit the drums, they ended up as a four piece - with Jon Donahue playing on second guitar (in his early appearances, he would frequently hide behind the amps so that the audience wouldn't know where all the noise was coming from). The live shows became really insane for a while, with a prolific series of incendiary experiences - smoke, indeed with fire and guitar noise. This culminated with the band nearly buring down the venue, on the night they were being watched by Warner Bros A&R! The accompanying sounds were no less hair-raising, and you can hear one of the best shows on record at the Tantalizor.
Despite the excitment that used to surround it, that incarnation of the band was relatively short-lived (some 18 months perhaps) and, fairly soon after, Steven and Ronald arrived on the scene to help tour the Warner Bros debut (Hit To Death In The Future Head). Thus arrived a new set of hazy days, based around a sound with a little more space, a little more joy and perhaps a comfortable bit less incendiary. These are the days we talk about here and, as you'll see elsewhere on the site, some very different days were to follow.
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