LIPS HAVE LOTS TO SAY.

Byline: Sandra Barrera Staff Writer

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips is describing his vision for tonight's Hollywood Bowl stage show.

It goes something like this: A giant UFO descends onto the stage.

The Flaming Lips members -- Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins and Coyne -- step out from the bottom of the craft, which then turns over and becomes ``an elaborate, freaked-out light show.'' At the end of the night, the band reboards the UFO.

Sounds great!

``Yeah, well, I'm going to be honest,'' Coyne says. ``I don't think it's going to come together.''

It seems that, down to the wire, essential parts still have yet to arrive, things that would keep the 3-ton craft from crashing down on Coyne and his boys: nuts and bolts and railings and such.

And even at the 11th hour the question of whether the Hollywood Bowl would even allow such theatrical edgeplay still hangs in the air.

``There are things that you could do in Oklahoma that I know the Hollywood Bowl won't have,'' he says.

Flying saucer or no flying saucer, the Flaming Lips' performance as part of KCRW's World Festival, with Thievery Corporation and Os Mutantes, promises to be as cosmic as its widely praised ``At War With the Mystics.''

Mojo calls the album ``a peerless smorgasbord of brain-bending sonic delicacies, food for thought and spiritual succor.'' Rolling Stone adds the songs ``eschew sci-fi glory for a hit- and-miss smattering of concept-free weirdness.''

Coyne simply calls it ``fumbling in the dark,'' kind of like the 45-year old charismatic frontman, visual artist and budding filmmaker -- look for ``Christmas on Mars'' next year -- is doing now as he tries to put the finishing touches on the UFO, built out of elaborate lighting trusses and ``stuff'' that he admits not knowing much about.

``I'm learning more as the day goes on, I must admit, but, honestly, a lot of these things that we do we do because we know we have to do new things. You find yourself putting yourself in the audience and thinking, `What would I want the Flaming Lips to do?' I'd like to see them come down in a flaming UFO and -- Wayne could come out of the UFO in his space bubble and go into the crowd,'' he says. ``Well, maybe that would be cool. But as much as you dream it up, you immediately have to start doing it or it will never happen. And so you work in a bit of a panic.''

The Flaming Lips have been working in a panic ever since 1984, when the Oklahoma psychedelic pop band put out its first release on the Restless label. In 1990, the band signed to Warner Bros.

Four years later, the band saw its first hit with ``She Don't Use Jelly.''

Since then, the band -- whose style might be best described as astro-whimsy and that All Music.com calls ``deliciously weird'' -- has produced more than a handful of albums and subsequent radio singles, including ``Do You Realize'' and, most recently, ``The Yeah Yeah Song.''

The latter single comes from ``At War With the Mystics,'' an album whose songs were inspired by everything from a dream of Devendra Banhart trying to change the mind of a suicide bomber to the idea that Coyne was writing a song for Gwen Stefani.

``All songwriters do it. They may not admit to it, but you just take on another identity and it sort of frees you from the cliched path that you take in your own revealing of yourself,'' he says, calling it the Ghandi approach to art. ``I make the thing that I wish existed out there.''

Like, a UFO?

``Well, yeah, especially when I was younger,'' he says. ``The idea of UFOs and all that being real now, you know, that's faded into being more like fantastical (expletive) to just dream about and think about. I no longer think that UFOs are real but I still think there's some grand mythology about the idea of space exploration. It's the great unknown of our time, maybe.''

Sandra Barrera [phone]

sandra.barrera(at)dailynews.com

KCRW'S WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL

Who: The Flaming Lips, Thievery Corporation and Os Mutantes.

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood.

When: 7 tonight.

Tickets: $5 to $120.

Information: [phone] or www.ticketmaster.com.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

(color) ``You find yourself putting yourself in the audience and thinking, `What would I want the Flaming Lips to do?' says Wayne Coyne, center, with Steven Drozd, left, and Michael Ivins.