But it took some time before the music lived up to the creation myth. The Flaming Lips were always blessed with the type of origin story that could have been lifted from a comic book – it’s easy to imagine flipping through the pages of The Adventures of Young Wayne Coyne, the tale of a normal kid from Oklahoma whose life was turned upside down when he spied some musical instruments in a church hall and, on a whim, decided to pinch them and start a band. He would later explain the Flaming Lips ethos: “We wanted to sing about shit that we truly didn’t understand, but then we would come up with these lines that cut right to the heart of things.” That was their essence: to find pockets of meaning in the most peculiar places. “You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t,” he howls. “I was born the day they shot JFK / The way you look at me sucks me down the sidewalk / Somebody please tell this machine I’m not a machine,” babbles frontman Wayne Coyne, before suddenly turning into a psych-rock savant who’s stumbled upon some deep, dark secret. Witness the sweet spot they hit on this ramshackle alt-country stomp, from 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. At their very best, though, Oklahoma’s finest have produced wonderful and strange pop music that, for all its oddness, is littered with sublime little truths. They’ve struggled in recent times to produce anything more striking than some by-the-numbers wackiness with Miley Cyrus. There’s a tendency, in 2016, to think of the Flaming Lips as rather soft-bellied beasts – glitter cannons, confetti explosions and laser-shooting hands.