Wayne Coyne: ‘How Often Do You Get To Smoke A Joint With Paul McCartney?’
Wayne Coyne has spoken about near-death experiences, sharing a special moment with a former Beatle and revealed the most famous names in his phone contact list in a new interview with The Guardian.
order ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (Blu-Ray Edition)’ here
The Flaming Lips frontman remembered standing backstage with McCartney at a festival in the early 90s while watching Neil Young perform. “He came in through the backstage,” Coyne said. No one really knew he was there. He came in with his wife, Linda, and I just followed him up on stage. He thought I was part of his entourage – apparently he didn’t mind that I was there.
“I don’t smoke pot, and he had a big joint, and he handed it to me as if I was part of his entourage, and I took a big puff of it, which I shouldn’t have done, but I thought, ‘Well, how often do you get to smoke a joint with Paul McCartney?’ It was amazing.”
When asked the most chaotic thing to have happened to him on stage, Coyne looked back at a particularly dangerous show: “We don’t do fire but we did do fireworks here and there. We were playing a series of shows in Texas and bought a bunch of fireworks and, while we were playing, we literally shot them off the stage. They’re shooting up and hitting us, they’re hitting the audience, they’re hitting the ceiling, they’re hitting everywhere. I mean, it was just fucking insane – you could shoot someone’s eye out, you could shoot your own eye out, you could catch the place on fire, we all could have died. Luckily, none of that happened and we came to our senses, and we really only did it a couple of times.
“We actually tried to do the fireworks [once] when we weren’t playing to an audience, just to be like, ‘How would we do this?’ And we couldn’t do it because it’s too scary. But in front of an audience, adrenaline kind of gives you superhuman strength.
“No. No one should ever do that. But we did it. We got away with it. And we will never do it again. On purpose.”
Coyne also revealed the most famous names in his phone contact list, saying, “Chris Martin and Miley Cyrus? Are they famous enough?”