Live Shows with Your Bubble in a Real Bubble

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Oklahoma City band, The Flaming Lips, are performing to people in bubbles. But like, real bubbles. Fans are inside of plastic, transparent bubbles and the band members are inside of separate bubbles too.

I mean first can we think about the band name? Did they name it after having extremely hot, hot wings or like my mom says, “hmm sounds like what happens to me when I blow up a balloon with my latex allergy, ‘flaming lips’.”  Wayne Coyne, the bands front man told Spin, they had no idea what to call the band and he “read somewhere about a group called the Flaming Hands, which was a name I’d liked and that led to the Flaming Lips.” There are many fans out there with different speculations and I will leave it at that.

The Flaming Lips are a psych-rock band which formed in 1983. They put on elaborate live shows and are extremely experimental. This wasn’t the first time the band put on a show like this. They played a similar show with this concept in October as well as performing on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in June.

The Flaming Lips provided 100 inflatable bubble “pods” for fans which held up to three people. They put on shows in Oklahoma City last Friday and Saturday night.

Originally, the shows were scheduled for December, but cases of COVID in Oklahomas were rising and many fans were traveling to attend. They though it would be best to postpone until the cases dropped. Coyne also included that their concert bubbles are “safer than going to a grocery store.” Although, the band has many precautions in play, there are still health experts questioning if it is safe.

Dr. Eric Cioe-Peña, director of Global Health at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y said to the New York Times, “I’d need to see how the air exchange was occurring between the outside and the inside of the bubbles to be able to say if it were safe over all or reduced risk of transmission.”

Dr. Sandro Galea, Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health is also concerned about having no evidence of these bubbles actually causing zero transmission of COVID-19. Galea says, “So, in theory, if air filtration is good, protective barriers can helpfully augment and reduce risk of transmission, but I would be hesitant to attend a concert in a bubble at the moment unless this has been assessed further.” 

Richard E. Peltier an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, suggests adding “a small CO2 sensor to the bubble” to know when it’s time to replace the air.

Coyne spoke to Rolling Stone after their October show saying, “We collect everybody and then take them row by row to their bubbles. The whole thing happened in 20 minutes from everybody being inside to everyone being blown up in their space bubble.”

The band has had the idea of bubble concerts since March when Coyne posted a photo to Instagram, showing what it might look like to attend a concert after COVID-19. 

They have added two more bubble shows in Oklahoma City next month.

I’m not sure if I would attend a concert with no scientific evidence of preventing transmission of the virus, would you?

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