‘Lucy’, he said, ‘We need your help.
It was 4pm on a Tuesday afternoon in March when the private number that was ringing my mobile turned out to be The Flaming Lips’ management. They needed my help. Wayne Coyne needed my help. The Flaming Lips, one of my favourite bands ever, needed my help. As you would expect from a visionary like Coyne, this amazing exchange followed…
‘So, Bon Iver is in Australia at the moment and we need to collect something from him and have it send back to us pretty urgently. You see, the guys have just finished a new collaborative project with Nick Cave, Ke$ha and a bunch of other cool people, including Bon Iver. Each artist on the album is going to make a contribution which will end up inside the record. If Justin is still in Melbourne and we put you guys in touch, could you go possibly go to his hotel, meet up with him to collect the item and then send it back to us?
The item? Oh, it’s a vial of his blood… Crazy I know, but gee it would be adventure, wouldn’t it?!’
It’s still hard to put this story into words, because nothing will ever explain the utter joy of hearing the words ‘Oh, it’s a vial of his blood’ come down the line. I was the chosen blood-bearer. There could be nothing better than this.
In the end, it turned out that the restrictive Australian postage laws meant that putting a vial of Justin Vernon’s blood in the mail wasn’t really going to be feasible or time-efficient (let’s not even go into how they were planning to extract the blood in the first place..), but that phone call made my year.
The bloody vinyl edition of Heady Fwends of which there will be only 10 copies made will be available soon, with all proceeds going to charity:
Viva The Flaming Lips!