MusicRadar

Want to spend a whole day with The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne? Now you can! © Paul R. Giunta/Corbis

"People have this idea that everything we do is far-out and weird," says Wayne Coyne, lead singer, guitarist and main man behind The Flaming Lips. "The truth is, our music is pretty crazy compared to what most bands do. To us, however, it's business as usual. Why would you listen to us to hear what you can get from everybody else? You wouldn't!"

Coyne has a point there, and he more than proves it on two of The Flaming Lips' recent releases. There's the 24-hour (yes!) song called 7 Skies H3, encased in human skulls and available as a very limited-edition item - only 13 copies are being issued on hard drives built into human skulls for the price of $5,000 each. (Take heart: the song is streaming live.)

Also out is I Found A Star On The Ground, a relatively brief six-hour ditty that folks can purchase with a toy called the Strobo Trip. But for those who still prefer their music in the minutes-not-hours format, Wayne and company have just recorded their take on The Beatles' classic Revolution, which will be presented on MTV's O Music Awards program.

MusicRadar caught up with Wayne Coyne the other day to discuss what all of this means.

A 24-hour song. Pretty conventional of you, eh, Wayne?

[laughs] "Yeah, right! It's pretty cool, isn't it? The great thing is, whether conventional or not, there should be no restrictions on where your ideas can go. If you want to do something that's different, you should be able to see it through. That doesn't always mean that what you do will be successful – or even interesting – but the important thing is to explore and see where an idea takes you.

"When we were doing the six-hour song, we said, 'OK, so now we'll do a 24-hour song.' At one point we thought about a song that could last for a whole month! [laughs] It's insane, but that's fine – a form of insanity is all right if it means not holding back on the art. A 24-hour song is pretty insane.

"Luckily, there are some restrictions. There's nothing right now that can carry something more than 24 hours. We talked to the people at iTunes about carrying a 24-hour song and they were like, 'No! You're insane. We can't do that.' I think the longest piece of music they have is 90 minutes."

In addition to encasing the music on a flash drive in the human skulls, it'll being streamed live.

"That's right. We'll be streaming it live ourselves starting Halloween at midnight. The stream will just go on and on. I think it'll go on for a year or so – whenever you want to hear some of it, you can. The only way we're selling the song is with the human skulls."

Which have already been sold.

"Yeah. They haven't been distributed yet, but they will be soon. And they're real skulls, too, from real people's heads. We would do more of them, but you just can't get a lot of real people's heads."

Go figure.

[laughs] "Go figure! Skulls are hard to come by. And it takes a while to get the hard drives into the heads once you get them."

There's 13 of them. Originally, it was only going to be five.

"You just never know how many heads will be available to you. As it turned out, we got more heads than we thought we would. It's a little bit of a weird thing, I guess, asking for somebody's head so I can put some music inside of it."

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