Photo: Press
Anton Newcombe of Brian Jonestown Massacre is currently in his recording studio in Berlin. After releasing two albums in just four months, he’s not the least bit work shy and is already chipping away at new projects. In addition to musical releases that are too hush-hush to go into, he’s working on a VR project and a film about his mysterious and cool sound man (more on that later).
“I like to get up and go to work,” he tells me. “I don’t live here. This is my worksplatz.” And an impressive one it is at that, he has two bedrooms, living room, bathroom, kitchen - it’s perfect for being able to fly over the band collaborators outside of the band to guest on his music.
For this latest record, Don’t Get Lost, neo-psychedelic pop singer Tess Parks came over from Canada and she makes a big impression throughout. “She’s good with words and she’s open minded,” Newcombe says. Other collaborators include Peter Fraser on saxophone and Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, who contributes a vocal track. Although their contributions came in a more modern way than Parks’. “I’m getting more into sending the tracks to other countries and getting other people to do things,” says Newcombe. “I’m really optimistic about those possibilities in the future of collaboration.”
The variety of aforementioned musical collaborators hints at the fact that this isn’t a conventional band album; it’s Newcombe and co. pushing themselves into the most experimental and diverse musical territories that they can.
“I was just writing all this music and it fell into two different channels,” says Newcombe. “One of them was when I or my group expressed ourselves in this vaguely ’60s-influenced heart-on-sleeve kind of thing that a lot of people try and pigeon hole us in as vaguely retro. The other was more experiential, more dub-centric - I wasn’t really trying to make it be one thing. So I started chucking the songs in two buckets as two releases.”
This particular burst of songwriting stemmed from a frustration at the music industry – something, like many topics, he’s unafraid to speak his uncensored mind about.“[It started] when we were on tour, we were talking to our French agent. They said, ‘we would book you but you don’t have a new release out,” Newcombe recalls with increasing agitation. “I was like, ‘We’ve already released a couple of albums since the last time we played Paris!’ I got really pissed off and so I started recording a song in French, and my band was on the way over and we just kept recording and recording ”. Hence the two different albums being written at the same time.
This latest release of “dub-centric” recordings was kept under wraps when Third World Pyramid came out last October. In fact when I saw its release in the schedule a few weeks ago, I had to double take – ‘what? Another BJM record!?’ This sneaky follow up was a lot of fun for the mischievous Newcombe.
“When I presented Third World Pyramid I wasn’t trying to go show off the best 40 minutes of music that I have to offer at this moment - that wasn’t my goal,” he says. “My goal was to make this decent record that was listenable and then have this punchline and come with a totally different thing, which is this new one. I was playing a little joke, saying people will sort of dismiss this - some people did pick up on that and go ‘here’s another BJM record and they’re doing exactly what they do. Yawn.’ But the joke is all the songs were written on the same days. To me it shows you the endless thing of people talking about what they don’t know about.”
Despite the new record completing the picture of a characteristically fruitful time in Brian Jonestown Massacre’s history, at present the band don’t have a European tour planned. “I hope that I do a European tour,” he says. “I hope that we come back. It’s weird, we could sell out a 4,000 person place in two days but for some reason it’s hard to get an agent to care about us at our size. We sell out every convert around the world, ‘what is the problem?’ There’s a leap between people that have no draw that are backed by labels and people that have big draws.”
But America is taken care of and the Brian Jonestown Massacre will be touring Mexico for the first time ever, which will be incredible to witness. There’s something special, an explosion in atmosphere and excitement, when bands visit countries where they’ve had strong followings for years but have never played. As far as revisiting the States, he will be on home turf for the first time since Trump has taken office. So what does he think about the new government? “Those nuts existed my whole life,” he says, in an ambivalent tone. “They’re just in power right now. I’ve just never seen anything like it. Now it’s from the upper echelon of these assholes,” he says. His hatred toward Trump and his administration hardly comes as a surprise. I have followed the progressive-minded Newcombe on Twitter over the past few months and have been amused and encouraged by his fearless ability to troll far right politicians, which is something he’s prolific at. “I find myself on a daily basis telling these fuckwits to screw themselves. But I’m never wishing them to get cancer or something like they say to me.”
Despite despising Trump, Newcombe’s political views don’t align to the two party dichotomy – he doesn’t automatically accept that a Clinton government would have been better. Newcombe sees the political world as far more corrupt, deceitful and complex than that.
“With Clinton we were going to have WW3 next week,” he says. “[Trump] is masquerading as this populist movement but the end game is it bought them time. In the meantime the whole conservative element of the message is to pass all this crazy fuckery."
Why would it have been WW3? “Russia said ‘fuck you, let’s throw down’. They moved their navy over there, they moved all their missiles pointing at Europe - China has done the same thing. They said in Syria ‘if you make one move, if you even shoot at our airplanes we’re not going to ask questions we’re just going to shoot’. That’s where we left this off. Now they’ve backed off. The atmosphere’s changed, it seems to have switched back to the Pacific and China a little bit.”
His views on Brexit are equally challenging, fascinating and not the subscribed view from mainstream media. He says that the motivation is beyond immigration: “They’re going to need a European army for the EU if it goes back to what it was,” he says. “What happened just before Trump came. The EU already voted on it. Trump’s already talking about defunding NATO. The UK saw the writing on the wall.”
As we discuss a wide-range of political topics, Newcombe is a fount of such rarely-heard information. But what would he like to see change?
“A progressive government,” he answers. “I don’t care if it’s conservative or liberal minded. I was educated by hippies with a 60s outlook, telling us as toddlers there’s pollution and overpopulation, you are the future, you are going to have to come up with the answers to save this world. I’m completely underwhelmed. When I listen to people with these extreme, beyond Tory views and see the rise of nationalism, it’s just bullshit. When you look at Asian migration to the UK or Somalis in America, that’s failed foreign policy that bought them. That isn’t just, ‘Hey come on everybody let’s just move into our country’. That’s the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The EU, that’s completely different I guess. It’s absolutely bizarre. I would like to see us accomplishing more things. “
Europe clearly has a fascination for Newcombe, hence his interest in Krautrock. “I’ve always been listening to that,” he says. “Even when I fell in love and was deeply influenced by PiL coming to America, they were influenced by Krautrock. The thing that’s really beautiful about those bands in that scene was the realization that when those guys were in high school, everybody was fucking Nazi, the plumber, the parents. What do you do when you’re a teenager and you’re sitting in class and it dawns on you that every older person walking by was a fucking Nazi? At the time American Forces radio was really big, trying to create youth culture beyond the Iron Curtain. They would have Americans singing in German just to induce the feeling they’re missing a party and start a youth revolution. They were really throwing a lot of money into that stuff. The Krautrock lot would go ‘we don’t want to be like American bands, we want to be our own music’ which is kind of cool.”
Outside of music Newcombe is also very productive – he’s currently developing a VR piece and there’s a film on its way about his engineer Kurt Kristoff. “He’s super gregarious but he’s dressed right out of the 60s the whole time I’ve known him. I know he grew up in a cult or part of one. He works on Rodeo Drive in these fashion places. Part of his personality is he likes to joke around and tell jokes and bullshit you. He gets in these personas, where he’s like ‘I like every kind of music’. ‘You like Britney Spears?’ ‘Yes I can find things I like in Britney Spears music.’ He will bullshit you for a week. Another time he told me he only wears Christmas socks. He said, ‘I bought as many pairs as I can find, different ones, I love them and that’s all I wear’.
"But nobody really knows anything about him. So I hired this guy to come to Paris when we were playing this massive show to try and crack his nut for information. I think it’s cool to have a film about us that’s not about us." Sounds like the cult classic rockumentary we've all been waiting for. Move over Dig!.
