“How did it feel? It felt like an elephant was standing on my upper arm and chest. You can get other symptoms – tingling hands and stuff – but this was unmistakable. I knew immediately something wasn’t right.” Anton Newcombe, leader of San Francisco’s the Brian Jonestown Massacre, is talking about the “heart event” that culminated in double heart bypass surgery in 2024.
When doctors delivered the news, Newcombe was, he says, “in dead shock, almost like a ghost. You know, I am a young 57-year-old – slim, active. In a lot of ways it just showed me the illusion that everybody has, which is that it won’t happen to you.”
Almost as challenging as the diagnosis and surgery, he adds, have been the months of recuperation. At one point, his manager Alan McGee, aka the man who discovered Oasis, asked him if he wanted to continue making music. “And I thought about it for 30 seconds and said, ‘Yes, I do want to carry on.’ If anything, it has lit a fire under me and made me want to try harder.”
Newcombe is talking via video call from his studio in Berlin where he spends most days cooking, rehearsing and writing songs, both for the Brian Jonestown Massacre and miscellaneous collaborators (later this month he is releasing an LP with the Scottish singer and songwriter Dot Allison under the moniker All Seeing Dolls).
Newcombe, who moved to Berlin 18 years ago, remains remarkably prolific, with songs “coming out of me in a flash. Like, I don’t even think about it. I’ll just hear something in my head and it’s all the parts. Then I have to teach myself how to play them.”
As we talk, he paces restlessly from one room to the next, affording me views of walls strewn with fairy lights, banks of recording equipment and vintage guitars, plus comically long close-ups of the underside of his hat.
Known for their staying power (the band formed in 1990), volatility and a sound blending 60s psychedelia, garage rock and shoegaze, the Brian Jonestown Massacre is essentially Newcombe plus a revolving cast of musicians who are hired and fired at his discretion.
Thanks to Dig!, the 2004 documentary that chronicled seven years of them and their frenemies the Dandy Warhols, Newcombe’s mercurial reputation precedes him. Directed by Ondi Timoner and narrated by the Warhols’ singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the film depicted Newcombe as a creative powerhouse, hopeless heroin addict (he is now clean, though still partial to a drink) and a fierce dictator given to upbraiding his bandmates during shows and getting into physical fights with them.
Yet the man I meet is a delight: personable, funny, given to wild tangents and only slightly defensive when conversation turns, as it inevitably does, to the band’s many bust-ups.
The last one occurred in Melbourne in November 2023, where the show was cut short after Newcombe got into a scrap with guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt. What happened? “Well, somebody [in the audience] tossed a glass at me and I dodged it,” he replies. “One of my guitar players got pissed and he tossed one back in their direction. And I said, ‘No way, I’m not having that.’ I tried to get security, the promoter, our tour managers, and finally I told him, ‘Put the mic here, put [the] guitar down and leave the stage now’.”
Newcombe claims it was in an effort to “maintain order” that the dispute turned physical, eventually prompting the venue to lower the safety curtain. “When you are in a situation like that, it is highly volatile. But I didn’t do anything! I got attacked by someone but the thing is I bounced out of it. I didn’t pummel anybody. In that sense, it was comical.”
Given The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s reputation for brawling, I wonder how many audience members turn up actively hoping for fisticuffs and ready to incite it by lobbing missiles if necessary. Newcombe shakes his head. “It’s always been that way. There was nothing to compare us to in the beginning besides the Jesus and Mary Chain, who were doing their let’s-start-a-riot thing in the 80s and where people were throwing tables and stuff. And that’s what generally happened when we started out. There was a lot of youthful energy, you know?”
Newcombe notes that at the start of their career in San Francisco, other bands were so threatened by them, they used to tear down their flyers around the city. “And in kindergarten, kids would try and stab me a lot of times with pencils,” he says. “There’s this thing that people do: the reason they’ll try and beat you up and be bullies is not because you’ve done anything, it’s because they want to show everybody else that they’re not afraid of you.”
In Dig! a heroin-addled Newcombe talked of his mission to “get a full-scale revolution going on”. While the Dandys signed to Capitol records, and spent half a million dollars on a single music video, Newcombe appeared increasingly unstable and refused the record deals that came his way on account of not wanting to have his art interfered with by The Man. At the time, his anti-label ravings seemed self-defeating, or perhaps sour grapes. But 20 years on, he’s had the last laugh. Having put out records independently, and retained all the rights, he is solvent with an apartment and a studio both of which he owns.
It doesn’t hurt that The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Straight Up and Down” became the theme tune for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, and the 1996 track “Anemone” has become a slow-burning hit, reaching 80 million streams on Spotify.
“Dig!,” Newcombe says now, “was all ‘Look! Anton’s blowing up his career!’ But none of those labels exist. They’re all boarded up now. The only game anyone [from that era] has got is to put out a record or two, get dropped and then come back in five, 10 or 20 years for the reunion tour.” If he feels like he is a man more sinned against than sinning, he will at least concede, “I made some mistakes too. You could say, ‘Oh, Anton’s uncouth, he uses dirty language and he’s been drunk more than once in public and let some people down at a show.’ But you know what? Most of my heroes [from the 60s and 70s] didn’t last more than four years. If you look at their streaming [figures], they’ve never quite translated. So I’ve smoked my heroes in every single format. Yet I get zero respect.”
That Newcombe will soon be heading out on a month-long tour of the UK and Europe, playing in 2000-capacity venues, would not suggest a man who commands “zero respect”, I suggest. He pauses and smiles. “I think as a musician you can’t have it both ways. You can’t come out of the gate, question the whole status quo, tell everybody to go to hell and expect a pat on the back. But I can’t wait to [tour] and I feel really fortunate and honoured to be doing it. I care a lot and I’m going to be on my best behaviour.” The band will, he adds, be back with its “core line-up” including guitarist Ricky Maymi and tambourine player Joel Gion; Van Kriedt will not be joining them.
Last year Gion, who is Brian Jonestown’s answer to Happy Mondays’ Bez, published a book detailing his early tumultuous years with the band. Would Newcombe ever put pen to paper? “God, no”, he says. “I don’t have a problem with people and their truths. But so many guys, when they get older, start going on about their [past]. It’s like ‘You can’t believe all the drugs I took and the cars I smashed and the money I’ve burned and the kids I’ve abandoned.’ They want to be remembered. They want to secure their place in the pantheon. If they want to be remembered they should build a huge mausoleum, like a pyramid or something. But I don’t care about any of that. I just want to make music.”
The Brian Jonestown Massacre tour the UK in February. All Seeing Dolls (Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison) release the album ‘Parallel’ in February 2025
