Wayne Coyne
Birth name Wayne Michael Coyne
Born January 13, 1961 (age 57)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Genres Alternative rock, experimental, neo-psychedelia
Occupation(s) Musician, songwriter, actor, director
Instruments Vocals, guitar, bass, theremin, percussion
Wayne Michael Coyne (born January 13, 1961) is an American musician. He is the lead singer, occasional backing vocalist, guitarist, theremin player and songwriter for the band the Flaming Lips.
Coyne was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Thomas Coyne and Dolores “Dolly” Jackson. The fifth of six children, Coyne moved with his family from Pittsburgh’s Troy Hill neighborhood to Oklahoma in early 1961. Coyne grew up in Oklahoma City. Coyne preferred listening to music and playing pickup football. He, his sister, and his brothers dubbed themselves “The Fearless Freaks” for their brutal backyard football games. Tommy Coyne, Coyne’s older brother, described the games as a “semi-civilized gang fight.”
In 1977, while in high school, Coyne began working as a fry cook for a Long John Silver’s restaurant in Oklahoma City. During his second year of employment, there was a rash of robberies in Oklahoma City. The restaurant was robbed and Coyne and other employees were held at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground. Coyne was certain he was going to die. The assistant manager couldn’t open the restaurant’s safe, however, and the robbers eventually fled the scene. Coyne believes “this is really how you die…one minute you’re just cooking up someone’s order of french fries and the next minute you’re laying on the floor and they blow your brains out. There’s no music, there’s no significance, it’s just random.” Coyne continued working at Long John Silver’s until 1990.
Coyne formed the Flaming Lips in 1983 with brother Mark singing lead and Michael Ivins on bass guitar, and Richard English on drums. Mark later left the band and Wayne assumed vocal duties. Wayne and Michael have been the only two constant members of the band since its founding. (According to allmusic.com Coyne “became the primary singer and songwriter” of the band.
During large-crowd festival performances, Coyne makes his entrance by descending from an alien mother ship (a nod to Parliament-Funkadelic) in a bubble and floats across the audience. Coyne has also been known to pour fake blood down his face via a hidden tube during live shows. Coyne does this to pay homage to a famous picture of Miles Davis who, after a performance, had blood on his suit because a police officer had beaten him during the show.
Flaming Lips concerts also feature confetti cannons, lasers, laser pointers, images projected on to a screen, dozens of large balloons, a stage filled with dancers dressed as aliens, yetis, the gloves etc. Before performing, Coyne can be seen helping the stage crew. Their performances have been likened to psychedelic experiences rather than simply music shows, a tradition that goes back to the band’s formation.
Coyne began making his science fiction film, Christmas on Mars, in 2001. It was a low budget project and principal photography was shot on a set in his backyard. The different parts of the spaceship set were built by Coyne.
The film tells the story of the first Christmas on a colonized Mars. In the film, Coyne plays a super-being who is curious about a baby being born on Mars.
Christmas on Mars was shown for the first time at the Sasquatch! Music Festival in a circus tent. The Flaming Lips took the tent on tour, showing the movie after each performance. “The concept was to come up with another one of those midnight movies, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I went to see as a teenager, all toked up, before the days of cable.”
Coyne lives on a compound of four houses in the same neighborhood in which he grew up. Each Halloween, Coyne dresses up to scare trick-or-treaters who come to his home. He feels that it is good to scare children, because when they grow older, there are things “that are horribly scary…you can’t just run away from them or turn on a light and it runs away.” Though an atheist, Coyne says “I wish I did believe in God. It would be a great relief to think, ‘God’ll take care of it. God’ll put gas in the car tomorrow.'”
In 2012 Coyne separated from his common law wife, J. Michelle Martin-Coyne. In September 2013, Martin-Coyne filed for divorce on the grounds of “irreconcilable incompatibility.” The two had no children together and disagree on how long they lived together (Martin-Coyne saying since 1989, Coyne saying since 2004.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia