On one fateful day in March, we awoke to find an awesomely blunt quote from the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne that was sure to get fans riled up and people talking. Coyne—somewhat randomly—bashed the Arcade Fire, saying they “treated their crew like shit, they treated the audience like shit,” and “they’re pricks, so fuck ‘em.”
Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was all over it, posting a blog later on the same day the news broke, which confirmed to the music blogosphere that a clash of indie titans was about to begin. Butler’s response, in short, was that Coyne doesn’t really know the members of Aracde Fire, or as he put it: “I hope I was less of a ‘prick’ then telling Rollingstone that a bunch of people I don’t know at all are really assholes.”
Eventually, Coyne sort of apologized on the whole thing, saying he wished it had “never happened” and that he “meant it about the guys that were running their stages at a couple of festivals.” Pretty much everybody knew this was crap (he mentioned “their crew” in the original rant) and now Coyne is standing by the initial comments:
“For Arcade Fire to even think that what I would say would have any impact on their egos… it’s all silly” Coyne told Independent.ie. “Who cares?”
I don’t care. I know what I said was absolutely the truth. I run into people virtually everywhere we play and they’re like, ‘Wayne, you’re the only one that says anything’. I would say in their defence that perhaps they have changed. But I don’t care. A lot of silly gossip gets built up into epic proportions. I can understand people who loved their music thinking I was out of line for saying it.