"His ear was very crusty." Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne on meeting Paul McCartney for the first time

Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips performs on day 3 of the 10th Anniversary of Shaky Knees 2023 at Central Park on May 07, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. — (Image credit: Scott Legato/Getty Images)

The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has recalled the first time he was in the presence of Sir Paul McCartney – and noticing The Beatles icon's "crusty" ear.

Coyne's fixation on Sir Paul's lug may have something to do with the fact the pair shared a "big joint". But it may also just be the kind of thing we should expect an eccentric like Coyne to hone in on.

The pair met sometime around 1993 at a festival where they were both watching Neil Young from the side of the stage.

Coyne tells the Guardian: "The first time we met Paul McCartney – he wasn’t there to meet us, he was at one of these festivals, and he came in through the backstage.

"No one really knew he was there. He came in with his wife, Linda, and I just followed him up on stage. He thought I was part of his entourage – apparently he didn’t mind that I was there.

"But I stood right behind him as he watched Neil Young play. I’d seen Neil Young play – I was there to look at Paul McCartney more than anything else. It was a long time ago – 1993 or something like that – but I remember: his ear was very crusty.

"I mean, you’re just looking at Paul McCartney as a human, you know? You don’t get to do that very often. And I remember looking at his ear and – look, sometimes when you’re travelling around a lot, your ears are kind of crusty.

"I don’t smoke pot, and he had a big joint, and he handed it to me as if I was part of his entourage, and I took a big puff of it, which I shouldn’t have done, but I thought, 'Well, how often do you get to smoke a joint with Paul McCartney?' It was amazing."

The Flaming Lips are known for the sensory overload of their impressive stage shows. And Coyne remembers when they introduced pyro for the first time – narrowly escaping disaster.

He says: "We don’t do fire but we did do fireworks here and there. We were playing a series of shows in Texas and bought a bunch of fireworks and, while we were playing, we literally shot them off the stage.

"They’re shooting up and hitting us, they’re hitting the audience, they’re hitting the ceiling, they’re hitting everywhere. I mean, it was just fucking insane – you could shoot someone’s eye out, you could shoot your own eye out, you could catch the place on fire, we all could have died.

"Luckily, none of that happened and we came to our senses, and we really only did it a couple of times.

"We got away with it. And we will never do it again. On purpose."

Coyne and co are on tour in 2025, including a run of shows in the UK and Ireland where they'll play their classic 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in full.

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Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.