I last saw the Flaming Lips in Singapore, eight years ago. It was a defiantly underground event, both literally (it took place in the basement of a convention centre) and culturally; the Lips’ trippy, shambling weirdness stands in direct opposition to the earnest, aspirational, fiercely drug-free ethos promoted throughout the Lion City.

It was also a strictly 18+ event, as good Singaporean children should spend their evenings scrabbling for a foothold within the brutally competitive education hierarchy. Whereas when the band played in London last weekend, headlining the Kaleidoscope festival at Alexandra Palace, small people were actively welcomed into the mix. To an extent this makes sense. Much of what the Lips do taps into the fusion of naïvety, nostalgia and melancholia developed by the Beatles, Pink Floyd and David Bowie around 1967; barely an image from Lewis Carroll or AA Milne went unchecked, albeit through a thick fug of hallucinogens. Lips mainman Wayne Coyne comes from Oklahoma and his references tend more to The Wizard of Oz but the process is similar.

However, there’s a difference between the childhoods half-remembered by the likes of McCartney and Barrett and Coyne and those enforced by the yummy mummies of North London. The Lips’ party atmosphere includes balloons, and lots of them, big, substantial ones, half-way to beachballs. In Singapore they bounced cheerfully over the heads of the punters until they burst or were otherwise forgotten. Here, they are grabbed by adult hands and passed over to little Mungo or darling Clemency to hold onto for dear life. Smaller children, meanwhile, are decorated with industrial-grade ear protectors, which does rather raise the question of why they’re being brought to a festival featuring lots of noisy rock music.

Actually, that question might be raised about plenty of the parents, it seems. From the absence of singalonging and an air of cheerful ambivalence towards any of the musicians, even the headliners, one wonders how many of the punters have even heard of the Flaming Lips; they were as much attracted to the event by the promise of face painters and balloon animals and gluten-free pizzas and other manifestations of a lovely summer’s day out. Which is all fine and dandy, and, yes, I know, music just isn’t that important a part of life for some people. But I wonder whether the next step will be a music festival without the expense and inconvenience of musicians.

And, the following day, this happened:

Hate the snobbery #desertislanddiscs sometimes brings out in some people with reference to castaways' music choices.

— Margaret Graham (@MarGraham) 22 July 2018

and I’m pretty certain it was a response to something I tweeted about yet another wholly admirable person who appears to have a pretty lame record collection. Again, I understand that many people don’t care as much about music as I do, and this applies both to the people who appear on Desert Island Discs, and many of the listeners. That said, I’d always assumed that the choice of music is intended to reflect some aspect of the subject’s life or personality in a way that can’t always be done through words alone. And as such, the music is available for public discussion and response in exactly the way the words are. If not, once again, what’s the point of having the music at all?

But I don’t launch into an unseemly Twitter Spat©, partly because I’ve got a horrible feeling that such disagreements tend to be ever-so-slightly gendered. Way back before I ever set foot in Singapore, I wrote a rather disobliging review of, among other things, Ruth Padel’s book I’m a Man. In it, she dismisses the (in her eyes) characteristically male tendency to think knowing stuff about music is very important, with a specific dig at Nick Hornby; this presumably offered her a get-out-clause for the numerous factual errors in her text. Since Padel is currently Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, I wonder whether she’s as relaxed about her students’ ignorance of Shelley or Plath. (Incidentally, when Padel herself appeared on Desert Island Discs, her music choices were perfectly respectable; which inevitably disappointed me, as I wanted her to choose eight slices of crap, just to prove I was right.

I did consider writing about the case of Keziah Daum, who wore a qipao/cheongsam to her high school prom and kicked off all manner of brouhaha about cultural appropriation and that juicy stuff, prompting everyone to adopt their instinctive battle formations in the culture wars. But, for once, I was inhibited about opining, what with me being a non-Asian, non-female, non-qipao-wearer (at least while sober) and all that. Fortunately, the excellent Anna Chen, in The Guardian, made far more sense about the whole thing than I could ever have done, pointing out that the garment itself has woven into it a whole load of other problems about gender and class before we get to whether some random gweilo is allowed to wear it and, essentially, that Asians living under the shadow of Trump have rather more pressing concerns than this.

But something still niggles. In the past I’ve made the smartarse observation that the end point of the whole cultural appropriation concept is that only Belgians will be allowed to play saxophones; only to be told that this is all about power, and it’s perfectly OK to appropriate from above. Thus, it’s wrong for Keziah to wear a qipao but it’s acceptable for her Asian classmates to wear jeans, because American culture dominates everyone and everything.

Fair enough for the here and now; but let’s think ahead a bit. This is the Asian century; forecasting history with absolute confidence is a fool’s errand but it’s a pretty good bet that by, say, 2050, China will be a hugely dominant global power, in terms of economic, military and cultural power, maybe even challenging the American hegemony. And if that’s how it turns out, will it be acceptable for Keziah’s daughter or granddaughter to wear a qipao to her prom; but not for the President of China to wear a business suit?

In class yesterday, we had a sort of cultural studies show-and-tell, where we each brought in an object and got a bit theoretical on its arse. My piece was a Chinese pencil case that I picked up in Bangkok in 2001. The main design revolves around iterations of Miffy (aka Nijntje), the rabbit character created by the late Dick Bruna in 1955 and (to his chagrin) something of an inspiration to the Japanese Hello Kitty.


But what’s special about this slab of turn-of-the-millennium cross-cultural kitsch is the slab of text on the right; some very slightly mis-spelled lines from the last section of TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Now, I have no idea why these two elements were juxtaposed. I’d guess that whoever designed the piece wasn’t a devoted fan of Modernist poetry; it was just a chunk of the English language and could just as well have been the Shipping Forecast or a recipe for pesto. Serendipitously, though, it tied in with one of the readings we’d been assigned for the class, Andreas Huyssen’s plea for students of culture to get beyond notions of “high” and “low” art and become aware of more significant distinctions (geographical, political, economic, etc). Here were two manifestations of culture, which most people in the room (and reading this) would define as “high” (Eliot) and “low” (or, less pejoratively, “mass” – Miffy); but to the anonymous individual who actually created the thing, there was probably no such distinction.


So, in one piece, high meets low and east meets west. But it gets better. One of my classmates turned the case over and pointed to a few Chinese characters, explaining that they were a reference to the scholars who passed the rigorous civil service exams in imperial times, the only way for poor, unconnected people to make any kind of social advance. So, in addition to high/low and east/west we had ancient/modern. And crucially, in these death-of-the-author days, all of these connections/collisions were pretty much accidental.

And you can even keep pencils in it.

1. It’s about 239 people.
2. It’s about an aeroplane.
3. It’s about mystery.
4. It’s about absence.
5. It’s about the families and friends.
6. It’s about the several meanings of “missing”.
7. It’s about the pilot.
8. And then it isn’t.
9. It’s about Anwar Ibrahim.
10. It’s about blondes in the cockpit.
11. It’s about the point at which the certainty of grief would be better than the ignorance of hope.
12. It’s about corridors.
13. It’s about Schrödinger’s cat.
14. It’s about 9/11 but, seriously, what isn’t?
15. It’s about China. Ditto.
16. It’s about too many disaster movies.
17. It’s about pings.
18. It’s about being told to pray.
19. It’s about the sneaking suspicion that the much-vaunted transition to the so-called Asian Century may involve more than a few mis-steps along the way.
20. It’s about stolen passports.
21. It’s about –stans.
22. It’s about conspiracy theories.
23. It’s about the Zionists.
24. It’s about the Illuminati.
25. It’s about electric cars.
26. It’s about the point at which Buzzfeed does a “What sort of MH370 conspiracy theory are you?” type of thing.
27. Or maybe there’s a Hitler parody.
28. It’s about cockups.
29. It’s about the internet.
30. It’s about how 24-hour news has to be filled with something, anything, even if it’s nothing.
31. Especially if it’s nothing, because that’s cheaper and easier.
32. It’s about sharks, circling, jumping.
33. It’s about wondering how this story would be turning out if more than three Americans had been on board.
34. It’s about press conferences.
35. It’s about The Rapture.
36. It’s about the Marie Celeste.
37. It’s about Lost.
38. It’s about Glenn Miller.
39. It’s about how quickly we forget Ukraine. And Oscar Pistorius.
40. And Syria. 
41. And whatever it was we were concerned about before Syria. I forget. Edward Snowden? Phone hacking? 
42. Dave Lee Travis?
43. It’s about 4’ 33” by John Cage.
44. It’s about Smile by the Beach Boys, or at least Smile as it existed in our imaginations, at the point where multiple different bootlegs intersected, before they actually released the real album and all the fun went out.
45. It’s about Google Maps.
46. It’s about people who are suddenly experts on aviation.
47. It’s about Chris Goodfellow and his startlingly simple theory.
48. It’s about Rupert Murdoch.
49. It’s about Courtney Love.
50. It’s not about you.
51. It’s about _____________

Do they think we’re stupid? It’s proven people with yellow skin are smarter than people with white skin... Thais who study abroad get better marks than their classmates.

At the moment, the wholesale reconfiguration of art is only being retarded by demographics: the middle-aged possessors of Gutenberg minds remain in the majority in western societies, and so we struggle to impose our own linearity on a simultaneous medium to which it is quite alien. The young, who cannot read a text for more than a few minutes without texting, who rely on the web for both their love affairs and their memories of heartache, and who can sometimes find even cinema difficult to take unless it comes replete with electronic feedback loops, are not our future: we, the Gutenberg minds have no future, and our art forms and our criticism of those art forms will soon belong only to the academy and the museum.

Thesis: Singapore. The no-spitting, no-chewing, no-jaywalking, no-blowjobbing, always-flushing, politely authoritarian economic powerhouse of South-East Asia, where an ounce of cannabis can bring an appointment with the hangman.

Antithesis: The Flaming Lips. A popular beat combo from Oklahoma. I suspect they may have jaywalked occasionally.



So the Lips play the Lion City, in the congruously incongruous setting of a vast complex that incorporates a shopping mall and casino. The band is consigned to the basement, because the best rooms are occupied by a BMW sales conference. But there’s a good turnout, representing the ethnic diversity of this strange island-city-state-concept: scowling Chinese goths with cleaver-sharp cheekbones; Indian indie kids who all look to a greater or lesser extent like Graham Coxon; sweaty ang moh, straight from the office, still in their stripy shirts. But for all their countercultural trappings, they’re good kids really. The tidy, doubled-back queue that forms for the mandatory bag check is entirely spontaneous, as is the one inside at the bar. Between the two is a small sign warning of “some profanity”. How considerate.

In support, we have the Raveonettes, all the way from Denmark. Now, I have no idea whether any of them have so much as looked at a controlled substance, but they are a drug band in the sense that they look how you might expect a band to look if it took certain drugs (see Randy Newman’s analysis of ‘A Horse With No Name’ as being about a kid who thinks he’s taken acid). They sometimes sound like the Shangri-Las stuck in a Chilean mineshaft with Ron Asheton’s guitar collection, but not often enough to make it all worthwhile. They’re a Velvets tribute band who’ve been reduced to Nico and three Doug Yules.



But then the Lips appear, and it’s like Dorothy opening the door to Oz, not least because the Danes’ black-and-peroxide look is bodyslammed aside by riotous colour, from the freakish back projections to the orange-clad dancers, go-go-ing Oompa Loompas on day release from Guantánamo. Not to mention, of course, the streamers and the confetti and the balloons and the balloons filled with confetti, just yearning to be popped. This sort of thing is startling enough in the context of Glastonbury or Lollapalooza: this time, you’re constantly reminding yourself that the Yves St Laurent shop is holding a polite champagne-and-nibbles do three or four storeys above.

And at the heart of it all is Mr Wayne Coyne, whether he’s rolling over the heads of the audience in a giant plastic ball or channelling Kenny Everett with his giant, laser-shooting hands. He plays percussion and bugle and loud-hailer and a succession of increasingly damaged guitars, but his real instrument is the audience, which he plays like a clitoral theremin. Yes, the songs are strong, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ and ‘Yoshimi’ and ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ morphing into glorious, gleeful football chants, but that’s not really the point, is it? This isn’t so much a gig, it’s more like one of those energetic, content-free musical theatre shows – Stomp, Blue Man, that sort of thing – sprinkled with the influence of crushed-up, naughty sweeties. To enter Coyneworld is to occupy a parallel time stream, one in which Syd Barrett got a bit – but not completely – better, and ended up as the drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire.

Coyne and his Lips offer something that Singapore lacks. Not drugs. Not really happiness; the locals are to a great extent happy, queuing, flushing, eating fish-head curry, making money. But something bigger, more ambitious, more challenging, more scary, wilder. They offer JOY, dancing-on-the-ceiling, knickers-on-the-head joy.



I’m not really sure whether Singapore yet knows what hit it.

(All pics by Small Boo.)

I’ve always been uneasy with the notion of Chinglish, as so often it’s an excuse to laugh at the fact that some foreigners aren’t entirely fluent in English. Ha ha. Of course there is no real equivalent in Asian culture (amusing examples of idiot gweilo making clumsy mistakes in Chinese), not because of westerners’ faultless grasp of oriental languages, but because we so seldom even make the effort and thus risk failure.

That said, there is fun to be had with the collision of languages and cultures. Sometimes a text makes perfect sense in objective terms, but still seems ever so slightly weird; for example, when a packet of Japanese incense is described as:

A convenient item to carry with you when visiting a grave.

And then there are those moments when all pretence to meaning is abandoned and what seems to be a random selection of English words are thrown against a wall; take the following, which I saw on a Bangkok billboard a few days ago:

You’ll find original super supecial road, it’s so great future!

Or indeed those that really are slightly off-target attempts to say something special in English, like this:


from the protests that took place in Bangkok earlier this year. As Andrew Marshall of Reuters explains, the slogan expresses (or would, if these purportedly educated Thais had got to the page that covers verbal adjectives) the disdain that many within the anti-Thaksin middle classes have for their poorer compatriots in the provinces, where the former Premier’s support is concentrated. But, presumably unwittingly, “UNEDUCATE PEOPLE” also communicates the agenda that countless governments and businesses and media concerns seem to be following these days, although few would admit it.

If you’ve ever spent any time in Asia – unless you’ve spent your whole time secluded in tourist hotels – you’ll have encountered the squat toilet. Opinion is divided on the merits of the device. Some argue that it is more hygienic, in that the feet are the only part of the body to come into contact with apparatus; and also that the squatting posture is a more natural one for the elimination of food wastes. Others find it very difficult to keep their balance, resulting in all manner of mishaps. Essentially, though, it’s a question of what you’ve become used to; when Mao Zedong visited the Soviet Union, he always insisted on taking a Chinese-style loo with him, which he would have placed on top of the barbaric occidental seat.

Increasingly, at least in premises where foreigners tend to congregate, sit-down, flush toilets are becoming the norm; although it’s also fairly common to have both styles represented in the same set of stalls, which surely is the most helpful and civilised solution in a global, polycultural society.

Well, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? The management of a shopping centre in Rochdale has apparently been advised that some customers from Asian backgrounds might prefer to use squat toilets. And seeing as how they’re in the business of making money by giving the customers a wide choice of goods and services, they decided to install a few squat loos, for those who might want such a thing. You know, a bit like when you couldn’t get organic vegetables in supermarkets, and then some people said “It would be nice if we could get organic vegetables in supermarkets”, and then suddenly you could get organic vegetables in supermarkets, but you could also get non-organic vegetables as well, if you preferred.

Then the Daily Mail got hold of the story. Now, to be fair, they could have really gone to town on this one. Granted, they interview someone from the British Toilet Association, who says he thinks it’s a bad idea, but doesn’t mention that installing squat toilets is rather cheaper than the alternative, so it’s obviously bad news for his members. And they quote the response of Philip Davies, the Conservative rentaquote bell-end MP for Shipley, who, after the Pavlovian bit about political correctness, informs us that “We in Britain are rightly proud of our toilets”, which is just plain weird, and perhaps a little sad.

But it’s only when they throw it open to the readers that things get really silly:

• What happened to western civilisation! I am certainly not interested in his backward money wasting scams.
• Absolutely disgusting that these things should be used in a pubic [sic] place in Britain, may as well squat in the street, yet more of the trend to Islamify Britain.
• You must be joking!? They are welcome to do number ones and number twos here, but don't take our toilets away from us aswell as everything else!! I can't read the Daily Mail whilst squatting down.
• I see, so now we English are not even allowed to sit down on the toilet anymore in case it offends "asians".

And so on. To be fair, there’s an occasional blip of common sense, such as this remark from a reader in Shanghai:

• Great news. Don't British people expect Western toilets wherever they go in the world regardless of the culture of their hosts?

which is immediately red-arrowed into the ground. But that’s the thing about Mail readers. Wherever they go in the world, it’s not actually a foreign country or a foreign culture they’ve arrived in; it’s just a bit of Britain that hasn’t quite got the hang of proper, British civilisation yet, where, with a bit of encouragement and, if necessary, a sound thrashing or two, the natives will eventually learn to speak English, drink sherry, and defecate in a manner that is only right and proper, preferably with the assistance of the Daily Mail.

PS: Just wondering if a branch of this restaurant might appear in Rochdale. Although the seating appears to follow the Mail-approved model.