Compound interest

WHEN HE ISN'T ON tour, or in the recording studio making sublimely weird music, Wayne Coyne, the singer, guitarist and guiding force of The Flaming Lips, can be found pottering about at home – though "home" may be an inadequate word for it.

Coyne's main residence is a two-storey, red-brick structure in Oklahoma City, complete with stone gargoyle on the roof. But he has also, over the years, acquired the three houses behind it. One he has painted purple, and converted into storage space; the others have been turned into guesthouses. The vacant plots on either side of the main house now belong to him as well. In Flaming Lips circles, the ever-expanding property is known, quite simply, as 'the compound'.

"It's our firewall," Coyne says, standing under a pecan tree in the fenced-in courtyard surrounded by the houses. "It staves off the crack dealers."

Staving off crack dealers isn't usually a concern for rock stars of Coyne's stature. His band has toured the world, released 12 albums – amassing combined sales of nearly two million – and influenced a generation of artists, from Radiohead to Coldplay. And his latest project, Christmas on Mars, a film he co-directs and stars in with bandmates and friends – and which he filmed largely at the compound – is released this month in the United States. Yet Coyne, 47, still lives a few blocks from where he grew up, in a neighbourhood of mostly one-storey shacks with chipped paint and weed-strewn gardens. Large dogs stand guard on sagging porches, suggesting the crack reference is more than just a colourful metaphor.

Living here, Coyne says, gives him freedom. "You can do what you want – when we rehearse, nobody ever complains about the noise." And anywhere else, he adds, "you couldn't shoot a movie in your yard".

He built the sets for Christmas on Mars, a "freaked-out, druggy movie" about a group of astronauts spending the holiday on a space station, from an assortment of household items. The result is a marvel of ingenuity: hot tubs flipped on their sides become space-station walls; an ice-cream maker serves as the machine the astronauts use to create snow. "There's a thing called big junk week here, where people throw out large items," Coyne says. "I would just drive around and stuff would spark my imagination."

Coyne is clearly a lover of imagination-sparking items, which are on display, in one form or another, throughout both the film and the compound, lending both the same whimsical, child-like brio his band is known for. Flaming Lips concerts are transcendent pop-art events: Coyne encourages fans to come in costume (sometimes as specific animals, or as Teletubbies, or Santa Claus) and at some point during each concert, he rolls over the crowd, encased in a plastic bubble.

Coyne looks like a combination of artist and tinkerer – one part Dali, one part Steptoe & Son. As he points to props and leftover pieces of sets, it's easy to believe his claim that he has bought so much duct tape at the local Home Depot that the store bulks up its supplies.

"We are the duct tape masters," Coyne says. "It's his medium," adds his wife, Michelle Martin-Coyne, only half-joking. A slender blonde, who is a photographer and a painter, she met Coyne in the late 1980s when he was working as a fry cook at a local seafood chain between tours.

Martin-Coyne is overseeing a renovation of the main house, which explains the presence of what appears to be a ten-foot, metal birdcage in the garden. In fact, it is the frame for a freestanding bathroom, or "pod" as she calls it. "The interior will be white tile, and I'm putting a light in the pod that you can change from red to blue, like colour therapy," she says, showing me into the kitchen, a white-tiled room with a masculine, industrial feel and a huge Moooi ceiling light in the shape of a spider.

The house, she says, was built in 1936 by a contractor who used materials left over from other jobs. The man's daughter told her the kitchen tiles came from a drive-through restaurant, the marble flooring in the living room from a city courthouse job and the banister from a local cinema.

Seen from the street, the house resembles a DIY version of a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house; inside, it feels maze-like and eccentric, qualities the couple have tried to enhance with colour. Martin-Coyne painted an upstairs bedroom "breathless blue", she says, after a sky-blue shade of nail polish, and her art studio across the hall has a pink rubber floor.

The studio is home to, among other treasures, a collection of vintage children's lunchboxes and an old jukebox Martin-Coyne got from her grand-father. Says her husband: "We're maximalists; Michelle and I both have the junk gene."

The house is less a quiet sanctuary than a full-time Flaming Lips headquarters: a place where band members crashed in the early days; where rehearsals still take place in a cramped back room.

Before the couple bought the main house in 1992, Coyne and his bandmates were living in Norman, Oklahoma, renting dingy apartments and scrounging for rehearsal space. Coyne's mother saw the house, which had been abandoned, and suggested he take a look. "It had been foreclosed on," he recalls, "and the bank was holding an auction. We bid 20,000, which was the most we could do. I was on tour and Michelle called and said our bid had won. It was like, 'Man, we're home-owners'." While Coyne toured, she learned how to fix the plumbing.

Both admit the living situation has been difficult at times, especially with the area's high crime rate. "Had we not been able to expand and create a buffer zone," Coyne says, "we'd have been in trouble." Seven years ago, they bought the home that belonged to their next-door neighbours and demolished it; the three other houses and two other lots have since expanded their property to about two acres.

Asked if he ever considered decamping to a more fancy locale, now that the Flaming Lips command six figures to perform, Coyne says the couple "did come to a point recently where we said, 'We're really going to do this place up or we're going to move'." They decided to stay and renovate, adding a new wing that will include a den and a large master bedroom and, of course, the bathroom pod. Martin-Coyne plans to cover the walkway on the side of the house and part of the roof with some colourful mosaic tiling inspired, she says, by the French artist, Niki de Saint Phalle.

Neighbours seem largely oblivious to the fact that a rock star lives down the street, even after all these years. "It's not like living next door to Cher," Coyne says. But fans do sometimes seek the place out.

One Sunday evening, not long ago, he says, "I was taking out the trash and I saw this suspiciously slow-moving car". In this neighbourhood, it was not unreasonable for him to wonder if he was about to be robbed, or worse. Instead, someone yelled out the window: "Wayne, you rock!"