When people rank the greatest moments in Coachella history, many epic festival moments spring to mind. Peter Murphy descending from the rafters in a bat-suit, dangling in an inverted Christ pose, during Bauhaus's 2005 reunion. Daft Punk's Pyramid Stage triumph in 2006. The Tupac hologram of 2012. Beyoncé's "Beychella" tour de force in 2018. No Doubt's spectacular reunion this year.
But another moment that's surely high on the list took place exactly 20 years ago, when Oklahoma eccentrics the Flaming Lips earned the title of Coolest Band at Coachella 2004/In the World. That was the year that frontman Wayne Coyne reinvented the long-standing festival tradition of beachball-tossing, when he stepped into his giant plastic space-bubble for the first time and became a human beachball of sorts, gleefully rolling and bouncing atop the Coachella crowd.
"I had a dream that I would arrive at Coachella in a bubble descended from outer space," was Coyne's matter-of-fact explanation of this bizarre stunt at the time, which he would go on recreate at many other festivals for the next two decades.
"I knew that we were going to be playing on the last night of the festival," Coyne told Music Times' Lyndsey Parker during a January 2021 interview for SiriusXM, when the Lips were promoting a series of COVID-safe "Space Bubble" concerts in Oklahoma City. "And, I thought by then, if you'd been at Coachella for two or three days, that you would want something, like, absurd to happen. Like, 'Oh, so another band comes on and they play guitars and lights flash — ugh, who cares?'"
So, Coyne began to mastermind a secret, surprisingly last-minute plan to shake things up at Coachella 2004.
"I couldn't really tell anybody, because back then, people wouldn't let you do stuff," Coyne explained. "I mean, now promoters and everybody wants us to do it, and begs us to do it, but back then, no one would have let us do it. This is something where I said, ' I'm just going to do it.'"
The bubble was inspired by the Flaming Lips' bonkers, cult-classic, D.I.Y. holiday movie, Christmas on Mars, in which Coyne starred as an antenna-headed, Santa-suited green alien. He'd wanted to ride a spherical spaceship in the film, similar to Glinda the Good Witch's entrance in The Wizard of Oz, but he didn't fully realize his original bizarre vision until the Lips took the Coachella stage.
"I thought I would be able to find a bubble in the world back in 2002, 2003, but I just couldn't find them. I ended up making the movie, but [the bubble] was all just done in the computer. It looks real, but it's not real," Coyne explained. "But as soon as I did this CGI version of it in the movie, an Italian plastic weirdo guy, who was a Flaming Lips fan, [got in touch] and said, 'Hey, I've got one of these for you!' And so, I got it literally a day or two before Coachella. We blew it up in my front yard and I thought, 'I think this could work.'"
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Things ended up working much better than Coyne had anticipated. "We knew so little about it that when I went out on top of the crowd at Coachella, our manager gave me a sharp pocketknife and said, 'OK, if you get stuck out there and you run out of air, you can cut your way out of it,'" Coyne laughingly remembered. "Since then, we now know that I could stay in that [bubble] for hours and hours and not run out of air. But at the time, we didn't really know that."
Reflecting on why the space-bubble became such an iconic moment for both Coachella and for the Flaming Lips themselves, Coyne shrugged, "Sometimes you just know that it's going to be an absurd moment, and you just hope it goes good and people like it. I mean, I didn't even know if people would like it. Maybe people would say, 'Oh, this is stupid! Why would anybody do that?' And I think that's part of it too. It's like, why did Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire? I dunno, just because it's just crazy to do that, you know? I think [the bubble trick] was in the spirit of that. I didn't even think back then that I would do it every night or whatever. But that's what all artists do. There's no rhyme or reason for it. There's no deep meaning, and there's nothing else to it other than 'I like it.'
"And no one stopped me."
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