You have to love Wayne Coyne, for his down-to-earth common sense and his big mouth, I mean he talks a lot!
Someone who says ‘I don’t want anyone to think that I really am trying to overthrow the government with our music, or stop the war with our music? That’s just for fools’ has to have a great sense of reality and absolutely no illusion and no pretension, and I love that.
And he certainly does not care if he offends people with his straight talk rants.
Remember his tirades about Beck? Saying Beck had issues and was prissy. And about Arcade Fire? Saying they were pompous pricks and treated people like shit.
He has said many things about other artists and bands: Richard Ashcroft and The Verve? ‘In person they were atrocious, egotistical fools. They acted like they were The Rolling Stones.’
The Arctic Monkeys and Oasis? ‘I’ve never got Arctic Monkeys – they seem too much like a British thing to me. They’re like Oasis whereby Americans can’t really relate to them’.
Even when he was asked to talk about the king of pop after his death, he did not find possible to separate the music from the man and candidly declared ‘The sad thing about Michael Jackson is that it’s so hard not to pay attention to the general absurdness of that man’s life, all you can think about is his face, the kids at his ranch…’
Well, when it comes to straight talking, nobody scares this fearless freak, as this is what he said a few years ago about Bob Dylan, a rock god if ever there was one:
‘What can an eighteen-year-old possibly care about a wrinkled-up old man with a pencil-thin mustache hunched over a keyboard? I mean, have you seen Dylan lately? You can’t recognize a single song he plays anymore. It’s like you order a pizza and Dylan brings you a pile of dog food, and you’re like, ‘What’s this? I ordered pizza.’ And Dylan says, ‘This is my version of a pizza.’
Now Wayne Coyne must have pissed off a lot of people! But apparently not Ariel Pink who is going to open for the Flaming Lips in September.