If you’ve ever experienced the joyous sensory overload that is a Flaming Lips show, you’ll be aware of the flamboyant style of the band’s frontman, and ringmaster, Mr Wayne Coyne. Given that he will spend the evening stood beside a menagerie of fantastical props – on any one night, dancing animals, aliens and skeletons, fake blood, giant balloons and streamer guns, not to mention the life-sized unicorns he’s expected to straddle, and with Mr Coyne’s customary arrival on stage in a “space bubble” – he needs an outfit that will help him stand out. So perhaps, when asked to identify his favourite fashion designer, his response is as you would expect. As in, unexpected. “His name is Nick Cave. It’s not the singer Nick Cave,” he clarifies. “It’s a costuming guy.”

That the Mr Cave in question is not the Bad Seeds frontman but a multi-media performance artist best known for his “soundsuits” – examples of which include demonic fluffy pink bunny costumes, African ceremonial regalia constructed using discarded toys and armour built from twigs, which makes music as you move – in this instance makes perfect sense. Over a career that stretches back almost four decades, and ahead of the release of The Flaming Lips’ 16th studio album, American Head, it’s fair to say that Mr Coyne and his clique of “fearless freaks” have worn a few out-there outfits.

But then, last summer, at the age of 58, Mr Coyne became a father for the first time. Speaking from what is effectively his office, his car, parked in a shady spot on his driveway in Oklahoma City, he has just got back from taking his son, Bloom, for a swimming lesson. So, perhaps fatherhood has seen him rein in the wardrobe? Well, maybe.

When it comes to dressing, Mr Coyne says he tries not to overthink things. “I would have an idea of what looks cool, and I would be completely wrong,” he says, looking back over some of the clothes he’s worn. “I’ve learnt... You’ve got to try things.”

But it’s not simply a case of finding something that works and then sticking with it. A demand for constant renewal comes with the job. “You can’t keep wearing that, because there’s already 10,000 pictures of you out there,” he says. Plus, exploring new sounds naturally leads to new looks. “The music sort of forces you to say, ‘I should look different’,” he adds.

“What I do think I’ve resisted – and I’m probably still resisting – is a set image, that I am this thing. I mean, I love when I see pictures of Willie Nelson or Santa Claus or someone and am like, ‘Hey, I recognise him.’ But you just kind of feel like you’re not done yet.”

“This would have been the heyday of thrift store shopping,” says Mr Coyne. “You’d go and there would be lots of stuff, even designer stuff. You’d just kind of hope that it fit and didn’t have too many holes in it. And that spotted shirt, I probably wore it for three or four years maybe.

“It sounds absurd today, but back then, it was very difficult to find black jeans. We would get blue jeans that fit us really well, and we would go home and boil them with black dye on our stoves. When we wore them and we put our hands in our pockets, our hands and wrists would become black and grey.

“You didn’t change clothes. Whatever you drove to the gig in and set up your equipment in, that’s what you played in. It would never have occurred to us that it was a costume. We would just wear it all the time. This was before grunge, but grunge... I never thought it looked grungy. I just thought it looked kind of thrift store. Kind of hippy. Kind of homeless person. And that suited us.”

“By the mid-1990s, the thrift stores weren’t as good as they used to be. Everybody’s caught on. I think the polka-dot shirt wore out, so then I wore this one for a couple years. I think I wore it at Lollapalooza, and I’m wearing it on the cover of our record, Clouds Taste Metallic [1995]. That’s how we did things back then. On tour, we wouldn’t even carry suitcases – just a couple of different T-shirts. Pretty ridiculous, but we didn’t stay in hotels. We just drove around in a van for a month at a time.

“I did give the shirt away, probably 12 years ago. There were some younger dudes who were enthusiastic about my old clothes, and that shirt was getting kind of flimsy. A guy I know now wears it. And he does kind of resemble me. He has long curly hair, and he’s pretty skinny. So, there’s a version of me walking around Oklahoma City still wearing that shirt.”

“That white suit. Around this time, we started to make some money, and we’re going around the world a lot, and you’re shopping sometimes in Europe, London… That’s actually a Dolce & Gabbana suit. It’s not a very good fit, but I had to get it in a hurry. I knew I was going to do this space bubble on the first song of our set at Coachella. And I just thought, ‘Well, if I go out there and I’m wearing black, you’re just not going to see me.’ It served a purpose, lighting me [up] like an Elvis Presley costume.

“I wore some light-coloured suits previous to that. As part of my stage antics, I would pour fake blood on my head. It was inspired by a picture of Miles Davis. Blood on an elegant, light suit – it’s something striking, even if you’re standing 200ft away. But it was very difficult to keep the suit clean. If we stayed in a hotel, I would put it in a tub of cold water and let it soak. Not hot water – I learnt my lesson. Sometimes, it would still be wet and even musty smelling, but I’m on stage, and no one’s smelling it except for me.”

“I was going through the airport in London and I saw this silver-blue, shiny jacket in a Burberry shop – I was looking for something kind of futuristic to wear. It’s a woman’s jacket and they didn’t have any matching pants. So, I get home, and I get some pants, but the pants don’t fit.

“All this stuff was insanely tight, but it did look amazing, and nobody else ever bought those. I mean, I never saw any woman ever wearing it, but I did. And I have to say, it was well made – I would wear the fuck out of it. It had some really great metal buttons on the front, and man, it really served me well.

“I would’ve kept on wearing it probably forever, but then you kind of have to change, because everybody’s already taken so many pictures of you in it. But I really loved it... It still looks great now. Underneath it’s black leather, and the colour has broken away where it has wrinkled. It looks even more like someone made it exactly for me.”

“The red suit is by Paul Smith. I wore it in a commercial for Virgin cell phones and they let me keep it. It took me a while to wear it. Then once I did, I fell in love with it. Now I get suits made for me by Paul Smith – vest, jacket and pants. It’s a long evolution: 20 years later, now I’m getting some suits that are just made for me.

“There is something when, as you get older, you want to announce to the world that you still have the ability to be radical, and I think I really got a lot of that out of my system. I mean, I’m almost 60 years old, so [Bloom] coming into my life this late, I feel like I’ve been overly outrageous and ridiculous plenty of times.

“Also, I have crazy hair, and my wife really does encourage me: ‘Just make your hair crazy. You can’t have crazy hair, crazy clothes and crazy shoes. That’s too much.’ Then I would go, ‘Oh jeez, you’re right.’ So, I think part of that is seeing ourselves at our most outrageous, being photographed with Miley Cyrus or something, being like, ‘Oh my Jesus, no wonder people think we’re on acid all the time.’ Which we’re not, but I can understand where people could think that.”

American Head is out on 11 September