Wayne Coyne + ACL Poster + Blood = buisness as usual for Flaming Lips

“They don’t need to sacrifice their vital fluids any more than I need to.”

-Wayne Coyne, being nice to animals

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Wayne Coyne printed one – and only one – copy of his poster art for The Flaming Lips appearance at Austin City Limits this past Sunday with his own blood. Supposedly all the other posters, though made with mere paint, have his bloody thumb print. This may seem odd… but it’s really just buisness as usual for The Flaming Lips. Uh, let me explain…

Blood is nothing new to the imagery of The Flaming Lips. Throughout their 27 years as a band, they’ve posed for loads of pictures with fake blood – which Wayne has used many times in performance as well, most famously while performing “The Spark That Bled” and less famously in the ’80s for their Exorcist shows.

One of the most famous of Wayne’s blood pictures is the cover of their first photo book, Waking Up with a Placebo Headwound. This picture comes from Wayne’s period of wearing white suits constantly, partly for dramatic contrast with his fake blood (inspired by a tragic photo of Miles Davis after being beat by racist cops).

Blood features heavily in some of their videos – “Waiting for a Superman” had so much blood they had to make a “clean edit” and “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine” seems designed to be a NSFW viral disturbance. Wayne even went so far as becoming a “blood brother” with Andrew W. K. (at least that’s what he said) back when the latter was at the peak of his party hard days. Later, when Ben Kweller had a nose bleed at Austin City Limits 2006 and generous fans threw tampons at him to help him out Wayne asked for the same treatment when the Flaming Lips took the stage on the next day of the festival….

aside from photos, videos, concert showmanship, books and lyrics there’s also Wayne twitter – which he uses, among other things, to tweet pictures of his blood. In fact, though news of this poster is spreading like wild-fire on the web today, it’s not new. The poster (above) was actually posted last week on his twitter, and for weeks before that he tweeted related photos. Two recent examples:

http://yfrog.com/nfbd7pj: “Blood drip with sunshine magic marker…”

http://yfrog.com/0xudhlj: “Poster blood… I once mopped up about a quart of human blood .. Dude shot himself in the arm”

…And lets not forget the influence of Iggy Pop on the Lips, and moreover, KISS – the band that spat up blood as a regular part of their show and famously printed their own line of comic books with their own blood.

Wayne talked about blood in the violence issue of Paste, on the shelves exactly two years ago. He said, “At one point all of us had fake blood, and we poured it all over our heads—more like Carrie, I guess, than The Exorcist… I knew when I went to do it again, you can’t just grab this shit and get it all over the place because musicians are trying to play some intricate little things, and stickiness is the enemy of all that.”