The ‘Flaming Lips’ rock out safely in ‘space bubbles’
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The Flaming Lips found a way to continue performing during the coronavirus pandemic — and it’s explosive!
The Oklahoma City rock group performed in front of a large crowd of fans in their hometown on Monday that saw concertgoers placed inside individual human-size plastic bubbles. With band frontman Wayne Coyne holding court in the middle of a crowd of excited fans in a bubble of his own, fans had enough space for a safe celebration without the worry of contracting COVID-19.
Coyne has been putting himself inside what he calls a “space bubble” for over a decade now, though now they’ve now shifted to giving audience members their own pods to ensure social distancing. They performed two smaller-scale versions of this on The Late Show with Stephen Cobert back in June followed by an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and NPR’s Tiny Desk at Home that saw the band enter individual bubbles sans an audience, before their hometown banger.
“You fill them up and people can be in them for quite a while,” Coyne told Brooklyn Vegan. “I don’t think people quite realise that. Since we have some here, we’ve played with them and messed with them for quite a while. I mean, even back in 2006, I would get in one of the space bubbles at the end of our big Halloween parade here, and I would walk down the street for almost an hour in one. Yeah, you know what I mean? It holds a lot of air. I mean, you can be in there for quite a while. I just don’t think people quite realise what it is as a mechanism. But we’ve just messed with them for so long, we kind of know that it can all work and how it can work and all that.”
The idea to place fans inside the space bubbles was born in response to the pandemic.