Protest music often means a bloke with an acoustic guitar rambling on about the government over an obscure punk rock riff, but no one's told the Flaming Lips. The first night of their eagerly anticipated world tour features musicians in skeleton suits, balloons bouncing about and exploding over the audience, a Captain America dancer, and a projection of singer Wayne Coyne's face blown up hundreds of times its size.
There are cannon-like confetti launchers, a ventriloquist's doll "singing" one of the songs and a hall full of party streamers. Elements of the visual fiesta are familiar from the Oklahomans' fabled 2002 and 2003 tours, but Coyne has new tricks up his neatly tailored sleeve. As people gasp, the 45-year-old with a child's imagination descends over the audience in a giant "space bubble". Cheers and nervous glances abound as the bubble-dwelling loon is passed around the audience, metaphorically and literally trying to avoid landing on his backside.
For almost any other band, such surreal panto would relegate the music to a side-show. However, as songs from the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots album and latest album At War With the Mystics tip into transcendence, Coyne's plaintive, Neil Young vocal sounds as if it is being physically stretched octaves higher by the wonderment around him.
When the band dig out old sing-along faves like She Don't Use Jelly, however, it is refreshing to remember that somewhere in there is a human rock band with chords, bum notes and a drummer who shouts a comically incongruous "Wun-two-three-faw!" There are flaws, particularly first night gremlins, meaning the gaps between the songs are a bit long. But there's a conjuror's sleight of hand in the way their "absurdist shit" (Coyne's words) gradually becomes laden with meaning. Coyne explains that the warring troupes of dancing aliens and Santas on stage (yes, really) symbolise "wars of belief": Christianity versus scientology. The deceptively bouncy Yeah Yeah Yeah Song deals with abuse of power, others with the power of the people.
Their "existential, protest-y" songs are so effective that it is not necessary for Coyne to rail against "religious fools" and George Bush, and illustrate a blistering cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs with images of Donald Rumsfeld. But this show, like Coyne's mind, never lingers anywhere too long. Holding up a weird "animal synthesiser" sent by a fan, he explains that they are going to create a song using the "duck" noise button and the "cow" button. And lo and behold, they moo.
· At the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, tomorrow. Box office: 020-7589 8212. Then touring.
