“We loved him so much for being too cool for us”
The Flaming Lips have revealed that they once attempted to give Prince one of their albums, only for the Purple One to return it to them almost straight away.
The late music icon delivered an incredible rendition of ‘Purple Rain’ at the 2006 BRIT Awards, and it wasn’t long before the Oklahoma band sensed an opportunity to make themselves known to him.
“We did a Brit Awards where he was performing. We got the courage to go over and give his bodyguard some of our CDs to give to Prince. We were so thrilled at the possibility of him hearing our music,” frontman Wayne Coyne told The Independent.
“But at the end of the night, the bodyguard came and found us and handed all the CDs back. He said: ‘Prince doesn’t want these.’ We loved him so much for being too cool for us.”
Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne
Although Coyne didn’t confirm which CDs the band gave to him, their most recent album at that point was the acclaimed ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’ – which is widely considered to be their breakthrough record.
This comes after Coyne spoke to NME in May to mark 20 years of the band’s ‘The Soft Bulletin’.
Discussing the legacy of the record, Coyne said: “Maybe 20 years is a long time to have figured it out, but now the music affects us too. We made it so long ago that there are no longer those muscle memory triggers of the struggles and the failures and all that it takes to make music like that. Now I just hear it and I’m like, ‘Who the fuck made this record? This is a good record! This is cool!’”
Their 15th album, ‘Kings Mouth’, is set for a full commercial release this Friday (July 19).
