HE IS POP'S MOST UNLIKELY STAR. A BEARDED, 45-year-old in his customary cream suit, Wayne Coyne looks more Willy Wonka than a rock god. But then he and his band, The Flaming Lips, have had to wait for their success. It took more than 20 years and ten albums before they made their first million-seller, 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

That thrillingly imaginative album, and the huge tour that introduced the masses to the exuberant, anarchic and wildly enjoyable experience of a Flaming Lips live show, left the public eager for more. And now, four years on, and after a prolonged spell in the studio, the Oklahoma trio return with their 12th album, At War with the Mystics, next month.

"It's insult rock," says the cheerful and gregarious Coyne. He speaks in exclamations and uses hippy phrases such as "freaking out" and "the cosmos" without embarrassment. I get the impression he would talk all day, whether I were listening to him or not.

The Flaming Lips write euphoric, escapist songs, psychedelic explorations of other worlds which, at their best, build to crashing, anthemic singalong choruses. This time, surprisingly, they've gone for a harder rock sound with a sharper political edge. George W Bush and suicide bombers are explicitly referenced. Has Coyne decided that entertaining the world is not enough, that he'd like to try to change it, too?

"Activist rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen are full of shit," he replies with happy contempt. "If I felt I should change the world I wouldn't be in a band. I'd cut my hair and run for office. I play rock music and say, 'Let's destroy the government'. I know it's empty, but it's fun to say. These songs are a release of anger and frustration, nothing more. It's like kicking a wall - it's not a solution, but not to kick the wall is harder. There is some anger, but it's more sarcastic, really."

On a first listen of the new album, it seems strange to hear Coyne employing his strangled falsetto to sing about reality. But the music is as inventive as ever - huge, multi-layered productions retaining the pop heart that has resulted in the band's belated appeal. It is every bit as good as its big-selling predecessor.

One of the best tracks, Free Radicals, is a sparse slice of guitar funk, more like Prince than anything they have previously recorded. Haven't Got a Clue repeats, "Every time you state your case/The more I'd like to punch your face" over racing electronic beats. There is also a more personal side to At War with the Mystics, emerging, for instance, in the mournful Mr Ambulance Driver. When Coyne sings, "I'm wishing I was the one that wasn't gonna be here any more", he is referring to the loss of his mother, who died while the album was being recorded. Other hushed, beautiful songs, such as The Sound of Failure and Vein of Stars, also see a bleaker world-view overtaking the band's characteristic optimism.

"I think we have changed slightly," Coyne says. "We now admit that there are limits of optimism and life isn't just here for us to be jubilant. People often say it, but I don't think our music is about escapism. To escape to what? We can't escape the only life we have -- all we can do is find what's good in it. But sometimes it's corrupt and evil, and we can sing about that, too."

Thankfully, Coyne promises that this change in subject matter will not affect the joyful carnival of the Lips concert experience. "I am never really in despair," he says. "I'm a grown-up man who's had pain like anybody else, but I would never come to you and say, 'Help me'. I'm like, 'F*** it, let's take some acid and freak out'."

On stage he is usually the only one not in fancy dress. Drummer and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd and bassist Michael Ivins are generally furry mascots, while the sides of the stage, left and right, are often populated by 20 or more fans dressed as rabbits, kangaroos or Father Christmas. Coyne works glove puppets, wields a belching smoke machine, pours fake blood on himself and strides out over the crowd inside a giant plastic bubble. Balloons are everywhere. It is a crazy trip.

"We don't just do the routine and collect the money. It really is like having sex or having dinner - you can do it every night and it can be amazing every time."

He says that the scale of the shows has grown almost by chance since the success of Yoshimi. Initially, they dressed their roadies up, "because we didn't want them to keep coming on stage in sweat pants", and soon fans were asking if they could join in. Even Justin Timberlake has had his turn, playing bass with the band on Top of the Pops, dressed as a dolphin.

The Flaming Lips name is variously attributed to dreams, drugs or a porn film, and it's a tribute to the band's uncategorisable creativity that they have been allowed by their record company, Warner Bros, to plough their own mad furrow since 1991, keeping their record deal through the lean years when commercial success eluded them.

In that time, band members have come and gone, notably Jonathan Donahue, who later became leader of Mercury Rev, and guitarist Ronald Jones, who abandoned them for a "spiritual odyssey" in 1996. Drozd has nearly killed himself through heroin abuse, and numerous albums have flopped while the Lips waited for the world to come around to their skewed view of life.

Their greatest folly was Zaireeka in 1997, an album that came on four discs designed to be played simultaneously on four separate stereos. With four hi-fi households thin on the ground, it was another poor seller.

The Lips abandoned the rock-and-roll lifestyle some time ago. Drozd had a son last September, and Coyne says he hopes to have a baby with his wife, Michelle, soon. They have been married for 17 years. "That's a long time, isn't it?"

Yet while they may be older and wiser, At War with the Mystics will still be odder than anything in the charts in April: its overall concept is something complicated to do with a space wizard and a naked star queen.

"Someone like James Blunt simply says, 'I'm James Blunt and my girlfriend left me and here's a song about that'. I'm trying to tell you a fantastical story, yet you realise that I'm this crumbling human underneath it," Coyne explains.

"Most musicians don't understand that this life we lead, touring and singing our songs, is more like a circus life than a life sensitively expressing your art. Me, I love the circus."

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