You could spend a whole review attempting to list everything grasping for attention during the first song of last night's Flaming Lips concert: the balloons of various size and hue bouncing about; the Santa Clauses and dancing girls either side of the stage; frontman Wayne Coyne walking inside a man-sized hamster-ball, rolling over the crowd before exiting the contraption to sing in a fractured, endearing croak and fire his glitter-gun into his adoring, almost cult-like audience.

The Lips were introduced by a jolly man in a pantomime mayor's costume, before launching into their secularist hymn Race For The Prize (a tale of scientists working themselves to death to find a cure for cancer), starting this carnival of chaos.

Barring some songlist and personnel changes and a bigger budget, it was pretty much the same show they've been playing since 1999's breakthrough The Soft Bulletin album, lifting the crowd to damp-eyed peaks of ecstasy for two hours. What startles is how spontaneous it all still felt, how unpredictable - indeed, all that was predictable was how profoundly moving it was.

For all their hippy-dippy, day-glo lunacy, a darkness stalks Flaming Lips' songbook, underscoring their Sesame Street psychedelia.

Death is a constant spectre, stealing loved ones away too soon with disease or unjust wars, but the Flaming Lips remain optimistic (it was a quality Coyne eulogised in his rambling inter-song banter).

Their message was that what matters is to taste the marrow of life in the time that remains. Do You Realise was dedicated to a fan who passed away a month before, requested by his friends in the audience; he'd had the song played at his funeral. The song's theme took on an extra poignancy with the entire audience singing the chorus.

The visual assault intensified for The W.A.N.D.: a massive video-screen showing a girl dancing naked; air thick with dry ice and glitter; blinding, blinking, brilliant white lights that turned the whole room into a strobe. It was a near-psychedelic experience.

At the centre was Coyne. Celebrating "the beginning of the end of George Bush" and leading all through a karaoke take of Bohemian Rhapsody, he resembled no one more than Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life, optimistic in the face of life's blind cruelty.

And while it'll take more than balloons and rock 'n' roll to make a better world, the Flaming Lips' brilliance lay in making us feel it was possible, for a couple of hours at least.

Tonight, Queen Caroline St W6. Returns only