"We seek out free shows. Part of our fan base is how we were when we were young – we couldn't pay for everything we wanted to see," he says. "We're always looking for a way to make something cool available for free, because concerts cost an insane amount now." Speaking on a recent Wednesday afternoon from the band's art gallery space, the Womb, in their midwestern hometown Oklahoma City, Coyne displays a professorial insight even as he juggles both duties and different generations. A comprehensive 20th anniversary reissue of the band's seventh album, 1995's Clouds Taste Metallic, has just been released, while the next day Coyne and his bandmates are flying to Washington DC to continue their brief American tour with Cyrus, who in 1995 was all of three years old. "I'm still working on the music and the arrangements, the visual side, the lights," says Coyne of the live take on Cyrus and the band's recent free studio collaboration, Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. "To me that's the best way to do stuff – you never really finish anything without having more ideas to add, and that's good. It relieves you of any worrying about what you're already doing." Coyne's work with Cyrus has drawn the occasional public barb, with the suggestion being the 54-year-old's friendship with the pop star is a matter of him satisfying a belated midlife crisis.

But Coyne sees Cyrus as a fellow traveller, albeit one whose photo shoots have more sex toys than his. "Sometimes I'm surprised at how tired people get – I'll be like, 'Come on, we're doing cool stuff!' I forget that not everyone has this superhuman energy that comes with getting excited. I've always had that, and Miley is very much the same way," Coyne says. "After a long, long day she's the last one standing. One of the reasons we love each other so much is that if she gets tired I'm there, if I get tired she's there." Coyne is full of praise for how Cyrus handles the demands of celebrity, while noting that youthful success was something the Flaming Lips never had to worry about. Coyne and bassist Michel Ivins formed the band in 1983, and for much of the next decade Coyne supported himself by working as a cook in an Oklahoma City fast food restaurant. The franchise is gone, but Coyne still drives past its location – where he and the rest of the staff were once held up at gunpoint – every few days.

"We didn't realise until later on that we didn't have any other skills anyway, and we were lucky that we didn't overly succeed too early, because we would have thought we had it figured out where in fact you have to keep figuring it out again and again," he says. "It showed us that art is creating an ever-evolving version of yourself." Since their 1993 breakthrough single, She Don't Use Jelly, which scored them a guest slot on an episode of Beverly Hills 90210, the band has moved between melancholy and madcap experimentation. They have cut their own discordant takes of Baby Boomer touchstones from the Beatles and Pink Floyd, and made live rock'n'roll a celebration with confetti and costumes. "Fame is impossible, who knows how to become famous, and money is impossible, who knows how to make money, but following what you believe in is something you can actually do," Coyne says. "A lot of things are out of an artist's control, so do something with the things you can control. "When you get that great coincidence of the thing you like to do reaching enough people that like to see you, hear you and experience you doing it, you're very lucky.

"This is what I want to do, and you couldn't do it if you didn't love it. I didn't make my life into music, it's the other way around: music made my life." The Flaming Lips play the Palais Theatre, Melbourne on Friday January 8; the Domain, Sydney, on Saturday, January 9; and MONA, Hobart, on Friday, January 15.