Wayne and the lot held their second annual New Year’s Eve concert in OKC a few days ago. Naturally, I was expecting pure insanity from the Lips at home on NYE. The show sort of delivered.

The Cox Center sucks for shows. It is a good 30 years old and currently is home to OKC’s minor league hockey team. About 1/3 of the seats of the 13,000 seater were empty. Some of those were taken up by multi-colored exercise balls to be used at the end of the show. The rest were just empty seats. That coupled with only about half of GA being used made for a bit of a lackluster crowd. Plus, a lot of the crowd was probably there on a lark. I saw lots of weekend warriors face deep in their Blackberries during the show. Not cool guys. I will never see a show there again.

The show certainly had all the elements of a normal Lips show. The show began with the light rigging being lowered down to only a few feet above the stage, resembling a UFO. Wayne then came out of the top of the UFO in his bubble that he walks around in and descended into the crowd. Of course, there were about 30 Teletubbies on the sides of the stage along with various other costumed individuals.

The band played a lot more older songs than I expected they would. The highlight for me was a bare bones rendition of Yoshimi Pt1. Predictably, Vaseline was played. As well as several cuts from W.A.N.D. After a 45 minute early New Years countdown, they closed with Do You Realize as hundreds of exercise balls were kicked into the crowd. . I had heard that they did an early countdown, and was disappointed that it actually happened. In some weird way it kinda made sense though. The Flaming Lips are by no means conventional.

All in all in it was a decent show. But it kinda let me down. I probably went into it with a bit too lofty expectations though. I would recommend seeing them to anyone who hasn’t. Hopefully, at a festival or a bit smaller venue. I will say to those few people who told me it would be better than the Radiohead show in Dallas, you were dead wrong.

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