Wayne Coyne is as commanding on a patch of dirt as he is atop the shoulders of a man in a giant bear suit in front of tens of thousands of ecstatic Flaming Lips fans.
In three hours, the singer-songwriter is due on stage to perform at Texas' Austin City Limits music festival, a three-day event attended by nearly 60,000 people, but for now he's sitting on a fold-up plastic chair in a hidden corner of the festival's press area, in front of a scattering of empty cardboard boxes. Through the mesh-covered chicken-wire fence 10 metres away, we can see throngs of festival-goers making their way to the main gates.
'People are still coming in,' Coyne says, his bushy tangle of greying locks hustling to the right as he swivels to look through the fence at the incoming masses. 'You know, when we played in Toronto with the Rolling Stones in 2003, half a million people showed up and we were backstage and people were walking in all day - like a f***ing mad mob of people all day. Even when the Rolling Stones started to play, they were still coming in.'
All that comes out in the space of about 15 seconds. Coyne, dressed in a sharp and slightly shimmery tailored grey suit with an open-collared white shirt, is a fizzing coil of energy who talks at double-speed. His words tumble out in chunky, excited paragraphs, and he often answers questions before they're even finished. He marvels at life's small wonders and is generous with exclamations such as 'wow!' and, his highest compliment, 'That's so weird'.
Later, he'll take over the festival with his band's huge 'circus of enthusiasm', boasting confetti, a giant gong, the aforementioned man in a bear suit, and an inflatable 'space bubble' in which Coyne rolls over the heads and upraised hands of the crowd. Complete with colourful and far-out visuals of naked women and barnyard animal sounds, it is a show that well and truly lives up to the band's tremendous live reputation.
The good news for Hong Kong? This is the show they'll bring to the AsiaWorld-Expo on November 13.