TORONTO – Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne has apologized after calling Montreal indie-rockers Arcade Fire “pompous.”
“I really feel bad about it,” Coyne said in an interview posted on Entertainment Weekly’s website. “I like enough of their music. The idea that I’m somehow against them . . . I’m not!” That statement stands in stark contrast to the comments he made in an obscenity-laced March interview with Rolling Stone.
“I’m a fan of them on one level, but on another level I get really tired of their pompousness,” Coyne said at the time.
He also accused Arcade Fire of treating their crew and fans like crap – though he used a different four-letter word.
“I thought, ‘Who do they think they are?’ I don’t know why people put up with it,” Coyne said. “I wouldn’t put up with it. I don’t care if it’s Arcade Fire or Brian Eno.”
Now, Coyne says he regrets what he said.
“I wish that had never happened,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I didn’t necessarily mean it about the people in the Arcade Fire. I meant it about the guys that were running their stages at a couple of festivals.
“I wish whatever had been said wouldn’t have been taken as such a defiant statement from the Flaming Lips, because it wasn’t.”
At the time, Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler responded in a blog post, saying that Coyne “doesn’t even know us.”
“The only time we have ever shared a stage with the Flaming Lips was our last show on the ‘Funeral’ tour at a festival in Las Vegas (over three years ago),” Butler wrote.
“I can’t imagine a reason why we would have been pompous towards the Flaming Lips, a band we have always loved, on that particular night, all those years ago.”
