Flaming Lips review – stops and starts make this too much of a good thing

‘You could have had a wee and got back,” the chap behind me says to his partner as Wayne Coyne comes to the close of another rambling between-song anecdote in an oddly frustrating, stop-start evening: over the course of two-and-three-quarter hours, there’s an awful lot of time when nothing is happening – the gap between She Don’t Use Jelly and Flowers of Neptune 6 stretches to seven minutes, what with watching balloons, and Coyne’s anecdote about Kacey Musgraves dropping acid.

The frustrations start before the band take to the stage. Plainly it is better that Brixton Academy is safe for visitors now, but there must surely be a middle ground where those arriving half an hour before show time don’t have to queue for 50 minutes to enter. When the Flaming Lips take to the stage, 15 minutes late, there are still many hundreds outside, and big gaps in the crowd.

Spectacular show … the Flaming Lips play Brixton. Photograph: Aaron Parsons

That’s a shame, given that they miss a good chunk of the main purpose of the evening: a complete rendition of the 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That, too, keeps losing momentum, as assorted stage effects are brought on and off between songs (over the course of the evening we get confetti cannon, streamer guns, mirror balls, video screens, giant balloons, costume changes, giant inflatable pink robots, lasers, inflatable rainbows, swinging lamps and more), and the music pauses for minutes at a time. It being Brixton, the sound is boomy and muddy at first. It settles down – but for 20 minutes there’s almost no middle.

After an hour, the band leave the stage for a longish interval before a second set, less gauzy and electronically shaped than the Yoshimi material, but just as suffused with the Lips’s peculiar ecstasy: Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung may be the only psych-rock song to ponder the upsides of petrification. But the evening is too much of a good thing, especially when 45 minutes could be shed without even losing a song. By the time a glorious Race for the Prize closes the show, the gaps are back in the crowd, last trains calling time long before the band.