Anton Newcombe is a couple of minutes late joining our zoom. He apologises quickly and without fuss. Safe in a snowy Berlin, the Los Angeles wildfires on the tv kick off a myriad of emotions and thoughts for him. Living in Europe for 18 years but born in Newport Beach, ultimately he’ll always be a California boy, he says. ‘I started out feeling not so bad because there’s a fair amount of people I don’t like,’ was his instinct at the degree of devastation unfolding, then realised ordinary folks are affected too. Low, middle incomes. ‘Even the bastards have decent Mexican families working for them. And all the firefighters and the animals, the wildlife. This has been a thought-provoking morning for me, how about you?’
We’re nowhere near lunchtime yet and the founder of Brian Jonestown Massacre‘s had a busy day already doing the Lord’s work, berating the owner of the platform still known as Twitter. Anton received pushback in response from the faceless and nameless, about the lively ending of the Australian leg of BJM’s 2023 tour – although the brutally lengthy trip was almost completed anyway, if truth be told. ‘Someone threw a glass at me, then the guy in my band throws the glass back and I was like “I can’t have any of this” and that guy freaks out on me and I’m supposed to look bad,’ says Anton of the Melbourne show in question.
Does he think he gets automatically blamed for any bother?
It’s ‘”oh let’s see if we can wind this guy up, poking the tiger”. Then why they should be surprised at the reaction, I don’t know. I’ve had open heart surgery and I’m not in the mood for any of this shit. And I’m not expecting it either,’ he predicts of the band’s forthcoming UK and European dates starting at the end of the month. ‘All these places where people have been bottled off the stage, that doesn’t happen to us. We just have love, you know?’
The Brian Jonestown Massacre are indeed the recipient of so much affection – from Liverpool in particular – and what a history of performances and experiences the band have gifted us. They’re back in February to play the Olympia, a venue of Victorian grandeur. He flags up his knowledge of the place, its history of paraded elephants, the doors out back specially made for the great beasts – the giant mammals, not the band.
Anton became unwell a year ago, his recovery demanded a sedentary state for four months, and taking a year off ‘for the first time in my life.‘ For a man who famously likes to keep busy and in possession of a strong work ethic, it feels quite the personal challenge. ‘I had to tell myself it was ok’. He recalls how his engineer and friend Andrea brought him a telly to watch during this downtime, with the suggestion to ‘ok, you can just chill out, we can get you Netflix’ . He binge watched the series NARCOS, about notorious Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar instead, hardly the most light hearted of stories.
‘It was hell,’ he says of the enforced stillness. ‘Every time you sneeze or cough, the way they crack your chest open, it just breaks again. When you hear about people getting into crashes or they fall off their bike or whatever and they’ll tell you their whole life flashes before their eyes. You hear it all the time. But it also happens when you have an incredible amount of time and you’re there and think about everything in your whole life and you have to come to terms with a lot of different things, the person you’ve been. There’s a lot to it.’
Being made aware of one’s mortality is sobering.
‘Just before all this happened, I was thinking, I’m a young 56, I’m not my grandfather’s 56 and then it was like, wow – you know? I might not live five more years. Who knows?’
None of us know.
‘I’m not worried about that so much. I didn’t entertain those kind of thoughts, I was always an all or nothing kind of person, whatever happens. But before you know it, you’re making wills. I was asking my friends well if I do pass away the lease can be paid for a while, take your time, sell everything off good for my kids. Don’t let some charlatan come and go “oh I’ll give you $600 for the lot”. I’m not very materialistic but they are my tools and they are priceless. You can buy a house with this crap,’ he gestures at the room of guitars and gear.
His new press photos by Italian photographer Francis Delacroix (Jimmy Page, Maneskin, Amanda Lear) are classic and classy, a musician at work. The shot with two quite terrifying black dogs baring mouthfuls of sharp white teeth at his side, quite the image. The dogs are no studio props but Anton’s own pets albeit electronic ones, eyes glowing red; he shows them to me on duty in the room, guarding his record player. ‘It was coming up on Hallowe’en and I was in this oddities shop and they had these hell hounds,’ he laughs, sipping from a suspiciously healthy juice smoothie. ‘They’re electric, they howl and their heads move, just 40 quid a piece and I had to have them!’
Playing guitar for the first time after his illness, he learned it takes days to get one’s fingers to where the callouses come back. ‘Because it really hurts to play what I play, but then I messed around a little bit and it hurt my joints and thought wow, my gosh, this is weird. I felt like my voice was shaky from not using it and wondering about it but then it was fine. And we were able to blow through all of our songs in less than three hours.’
BJM always pull from a selection of 30 songs for shows, nothing changes there. But on this tour it’s three nights playing, one off to take a breather. A sensible approach.
He speaks affectionately of the band. It’s always ‘we’ not ’me’ when he talks of them. ‘I really see the band as an organism, it’s like team sport. Teams are great because everybody’s great, do you see what I mean?’ he says. ‘I have firm commitments from everyone involved that they’re going to go a little bit easy on drinking or any of that stuff.’
Not only is there a tour for 2025 but a gorgeous new album Parallel, a collaboration with Scottish musician Dot Allison to look forward to. The project is called All Seeing Dolls. On the back of the dollar is a pyramid with an eye, he explains. ‘The all seeing eye. On the dollar. On the doll.’ Anton waits patiently for the penny to drop at this end. It does, eventually. ‘Imaginary friends, dolls, I wonder what they see. When the girl goes to school and the mom comes in the room to tidy up maybe, what does the doll see?’ Anton grins wickedly. ‘The dolls see everything…’
He did music for TV show Annika with Dot in 2021, and as we move through Parallel, we pick up on a soundtrack feel in ‘Siren Echo’s Iron Lung‘, ‘What Do Dolls Dream’ and ‘Time‘. ‘She’s a great person. So productive these days. I have a lot of respect for her creativity levels, she’s in the studio working with amazing women, like Hannah Peel. Great, great! ‘
The singer’s singer himself Scott Walker described Alllison as having ‘great pipes.’ ‘He should know,’ says Anton. ‘I love, loved him my whole life.’
The aim with All Seeing Dolls was to build a world around Dot and the songs she wrote on the sofa at home with an acoustic guitar. ‘She calls it busking,’ he reveals. ‘My secret plan is to set you free’ is what he told Dot at the start, and proceeded to build a world around her voice and guitar. ‘I don’t do anything to it. I leave it as is and try to create something around it.’
Working with women of distinctive voice and identity is a creative pleasure for him. ‘I really want to encourage women not just play but work in the music industry, my engineer and tour manager is a woman and I write as much as I can with or for women.’ Tess Parks, Emmanuelle Seigner in the bilingual L’Epée project, and the recent single ‘Don’t Look at Me’ with Aimee Nash are cases in point. They go back years, old friends, he and Aimee. He sliced up what she sang on single ‘Don’t Look at Me’, and put it in random order ‘where it wasn’t saying anything but I love the say it sounds, hypnotic, you know?’ The repetition of her singing ‘do no harm’ is particularly poignant in these troubled times, a flavour of the Hippocratic oath over a bed of percussion and guitar.
An enthusiastic collaborator, he writes so many songs, and likes to reach out to those singing outside of English. ‘Not like the Beatles took I Wanna Hold Your Hand and sung it in German because that’s cute and you can make money,’ but to accommodate cultures. ‘I have fans all over the world and it’s nice to do that. Let’s move forward. I get that vibe a lot.‘
Anton is currently managed by former Creation boss Alan McGee. ‘I stopped working with my old person and started working with my new person,’ he states of his new working relationship. ‘He’s seen it all, dealt with every flavour of lunatic and I respect him. There ain’t nothing about me that’s gonna shock Alan.’ Anton himself gleefully recalls when playing on the same bill as Oasis, telling Noel Gallagher they sounded like Guns N Roses, but in his next breath sincerely praises Liam for his sheer graft as a solo performer.
Oh yes, Anton may have been out of action for a while but he’s still got opinions. On pretty much everything. Sound advice for musicians, for one. ‘I’m personally not that impressed with someone with an iPad just doing beeps and blobs and super compressed vocals, singing about nothing. We need more diversity, equity, they put all kinds of people up on these stages,’ he says of last year’s Glastonbury. ‘None of them could play because they’d come out of their bedrooms with their iPads, complaining about the monitors. Get out of your headphones, play in a pub. Get your people in the back room of a pub and go for it.’ And he divides musicians into cheerleaders or freaks. Once you start categorising, you can’t stop. Try it. BJM, of course, are freaks. We wouldn’t expect anything else.
There’s a new BJM single coming out when the tour hits Europe, these shows really are a winter highlight, in mighty venues of size and stature. ‘I feel honoured to be playing these places,’ he says. When the dates were announced, Anton gave the easy to follow instruction all his audience – all you have to do is buy a ticket and plan your outfit. Now that, is a fine idea. ‘I think I’m going to write more. I can’t see any reason why I won’t,’ he says of the coming year. Nothing’s going to keep Anton Newcombe still for long. Hallelujah for that.
Parallel by Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison is released via A Recordings on 7 February.
UK tour dates:
1 February De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill on Sea
2 February Marble Factory, Bristol
4 February Rock City, Nottingham
6 February Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow
7 February Olympia, Liverpool
8 February Beckett University Student Union, Leeds
9 February NX, Newcastle
11 February Ulster Hall, Belfast
12 February Olympia, Dublin, IE
14 February Albert Hall, Manchester
15 February Guildhall, Southampton
16 February O2 Academy Brixton, London
18 February O2 Institute, Birmingham
19 February Dome, Brighton
20 February Great Hall, Cardiff
Anton Newcombe 2024 photo credit: Francis Delacroix
Brian Jonestown Massacre, Liverpool Camp & Furnace, February 2023 photo credit: Lucy McLachlan
