Flaming Lips, Alexandra Palace, London

“And it goes fast. You think of the past. Suddenly everything has changed”.

The people that decry these Don’t Look Back shows will tell you that pop music is all about forward-looking anticipation, all about the future. They have a point, they’re even definitely a bit right, but really they’re mostly a bit wrong. The future lasts no time, it barely exists. Bang, it’s the present. Oh, bye then. Now it’s the past. The future’s too easy to get to. Going backwards is tougher.

Pop music is nostalgia, you’ve just got to adjust your nostalgia definitions, don’t worry, dictionaries lie all the time. Pop music is memories and celebration. The songs you love, whether that happened last week or 20 years ago, they’re all attributable to time, place and/or person. The first flash of re-hearing your favourite records spills over with deep-sigh memory, the rest of the time is filled with love, and great music.

It took a while for The Flaming Lips to get into those memories. ‘Transmissions…’ was a taped-from-friends staple and, yeah, we saw them a couple of times at festivals, but they were always slightly on the periphery; a touch too inconsistent to be in constant rotation, and way-too-weird to fill the dancefloors of our Essex indie discos. So that song/time/place/person collision never really happened (though there were a few close-calls with ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’).

Later we heard about ‘Zaireeka’ and grinned at the preposterous ambition, we heard about the car-park experiments and imploded with awed jealousy, we heard, but we weren’t really listening.

In 1999 The Flaming Lips played the Bowlie Weekender. We saw the gong, we saw the puppets, we saw the blood oozing through Wayne’s now quite tidy hair, but, more than that, we listened; we listened to ‘The Soft Bulletin’. We felt those ferocious drums in ‘Race For The Prize’ pummel us backwards, we felt ‘Waitin’ For Superman’ draw us back forwards. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this booming, pulsating, huge pop record full of life, love, death and hope in our world, and our world was never the same again. Nothing else sounded like it, nothing else felt like it. We saw the future, embraced the present and treasured our past.

And the venues and balloons got bigger. We didn’t miss a show, ever. They played ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and didn’t make it sound trite, they played ‘White Christmas’ and you believed this wasn’t just seasonal cutes, they wrote a song that gets me here (fist is on my heart) and here (finger is pointing towards tear ducts), not just when I hear it but when I simply think about it. They seemed humble, grateful and in love with the songs. Wayne‘s mantra was “You know, I’m not the greatest singer, but I truly believe if I sing these songs with all my heart and you believe in them then we’ll be ok”. And he was right. And we did believe in them.

And the venues and balloons got bigger. The balloons got so big you couldn’t see the band, they stopped playing ‘Waitin’ For Superman’ and swapped it for fans doing wedding proposals, they stopped playing ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and started playing ‘War Pigs’. Something had got lost amongst the confetti. Wayne said, in a Pitchfork interview, that playing four of their ‘sad, epic songs’ in a row made them want to freak out again. We understood, there’s nothing worse than a bored band. We still went to all the shows, and it’s got better again recently, ‘Embryonic’ is like their ‘City Slickers’ record, they seem liberated by the freedom, running wild, rediscovering that zest, finding answers in the noise. It can’t be coincidence that Wayne’s hair is out of control again, Michael’s, admittedly, less so.

But, really - hands-up honest moment - man do we miss those sad epic songs. So we’re here, at Alexandra Palace: God, those drums, those ‘Race For The Prize’ drums are still brutal - ‘Soft Bulletin’ ain’t that gentle y’know - still totally destroy. Deep breath, going to get through this memories/past/present meltdown. Except tonight we know the future and, oh Lord, it’s ‘A Spoonful Weighs A Ton’. Too much, just too much “…and the noise it made was love”.

‘The Soft Bulletin’ is so gentle y’know, has such a fragile hope that if one person cares enough, tries hard enough, loves enough and stands up to say “Hey, yeah” that they can make a difference. That doing the right thing is contagious. Who wouldn’t want to buy into that? It’s what made the anger and frustration of ‘At War With The Mystics’ so sad and unlovable. It was like these guys who knew and told us what was right just gave up on the ideals. Wait, it was like they were Superman and it just got too heavy. Goddamn the Flaming Lips for not playing this anymore, Goddamn them for not saving the world, and God bless them for playing it tonight, and God bless them for saving us. No deep-sigh memory draws a bigger gasp of recognition than this heartbreaker, nothing’s so forlorn. Hell, if Superman, the most iconic of all the superheroes, can’t save the world because it’s all just too much then what chance do we stand? As hopeful as this album is in places, it’s also cruelly realistic. But while we’ve not been dropped or forgotten we’ll keep on waiting.

Every song tonight matters, every song is beautiful, the slightly bashful apologies for the potential mess of ‘Feel Yourself Disintegrate’ reminds of the Wayne from ‘99, and of course they play it wonderfully, of course it nearly steals the show. They close with ‘Do You Realize’; don’t know if ‘Embryonic’ has rekindled a love for the sad epic songs, but they’ve rarely played it better. The balloons can pop, the confetti can turn to mulch; tonight isn’t about the show, it’s about the songs, about The Flaming Lips, and we’ll remember it always. I’m already getting nostalgic for their next show.