The Flaming Lips - Apollo, Manchester 27/05/14

I went in, unsurprisingly, expecting no end of silliness and flamboyance, but to try to second guess the Oklahomans any more specifically than that has long since been a futile exercise. Case in point; the first thing Wayne Coyne does, as he arrives on stage in a one-piece body suit that gives the effect that his skin’s been flayed off, is inform the crowd that the band were here two weeks ago, recording a performance with Miley Cyrus for the Billboard awards; her name’s met with widespread jeering.

There seems to be some real trepidation in the early stages; you’d expect a band this long in the tooth - thirty-one years in the business - to be completely assured in this environment by now, but when they open with only their second live performance of “The Abandoned Hospital Ship” in twenty years, Coyne sounds nervous, constantly filling instrumental interludes with shouts of encouragement to the crowd. That track’s explosive, guitar-driven outro should blow away any remaining cobwebs, but it’s followed by an awkward half-cover of “I Wanna Be Adored”, and a rendition of “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part One” is interrupted by Coyne early on, with the audience’s “chop, chop!” shout apparently not meeting with his satisfaction first time round.

Of course, this is still a Flaming Lips show; they’re joined, in the early stages, by a array of giant, dancing inflatables, with butterflies, the sun and glittery aliens amongst those rolled out. As you’d expect, the attention - the sheer dedication - to visual detail is remarkable; confetti canyons are in near-constant operation, and two huge screens provide a vibrant, psychedelic backdrop throughout; the trailing, fibreoptic tentacles trailing from above, meanwhile, do a good job of lending an extra-terrestrial feel to the band’s surroundings.

Coyne, meanwhile, is difficult to get a read on; he seems mildly displeased with the crowd for the early part of the show; at around the midpoint, he prefaces “Race for the Prize” by claiming, “we did this in Milan, or maybe Barcelona, and everybody sang along with a very specfic melody. I don’t know, it was exhilarating. It was kind of nice.” Those gathered rise to his passive-aggressive challenge, though, and it’s with The Soft Bulletin’s opener that the show takes a serious turn for the better.

The main man returns, after a swift costume change, perched on a ten-foot platform that one of the screens converts into; he spends much of the rest of the show there, blasting through blistering new cuts from last year’s The Terror - “Try to Explain”, “Look…The Sun Is Rising” - and a slew of classics, with Embryonic big-hitters “Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast” and “Silver Trembling Hands” meeting with the most rapturous receptions. Coyne hops down from his platform temporarily, and suddenly he’s a beacon of humility; acknowledging a handful of die-hards who’ve turned up in fancy dress, he delivers a genuinely poignant speech about how the crowd have the ability to change each other’s lives for the better. It’s cliched, sure, but there’s no question whatsoever that he means it.

To that end, “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” - with its euphoric refrain of “the sound they made was love” - feels like a perfect closer; it’s one of the few tracks, too, that isn’t troubled by overly loud bass. There’s an encore, with Coyne now clad in an altogether-more-sensible metallic silver suit - first up is “Do You Realize ??”, which really belongs at this end of the show; like most of the Lips’ finest, it’s nothing if not life-affirming. The decision to close on an undeniably self-indulgent cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is questionable - it goes on twice as long as it should - but with their own take on Sgt. Pepper in the pipeline, it’s hard to begrudge them one quick shot of straight-up promotion; after all, every other indication tonight is that they’re here, in front of us, for no other reason than the love of it.