The New Cue #444 November 25: Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe
"Don't rest on your laurels, because your laurels are just a bunch of leaves."
Hello there,
You join us on this fine Monday morning for an audience with Brian Jonestown Massacre ringleader Anton Newcombe. Over the past three decades, Anton has likely been doing one of two things: making a record or touring a record. There have been 20 BJM albums since they emerged in the early 90s, the most recent being 2023’s The Future Is Your Past. Some of their releases are heavier than others but each spins around an axis of stormy psychedelic rock, melodic 60s pop and garage freak outs. Earlier this month, BJM released a new single, a delightfully woozy collaboration with Australian artist Aimee Nash:
When we (hello, Niall here) spoke on a mid-November Tuesday morning, Anton had just got back home to Berlin after visiting his sister in his native California. In the period he’d been away, winter had arrived. “I missed the transition,” he says. “We’re a little bit higher up here than the UK. On the equinox, it just snaps.”
Luckily, he has a lot to take his mind off the cold. As well as the new BJM material, there’s also an album that he’s made with Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison due out in early 2025, the same time that he’ll be back on the road for a European and UK tour with Brian Jonestown Massacre – you can get full details and dates here. His whole ethos about writing these days, he says, is that you need to stop and come back to it cold.
“It’s important to put it down at some point,” he says. “That process where you’re starting from square one keeps it real, you really have to want to play music, you can’t assume that you’re going to be great. The only thing I can assume is that everybody’s going to bite it at some time. All my heroes were piss poor at a certain point. Knowing when to hang it up is so important, too. You always have to fight like hell, that’s what I have to do. I have to remember that I really want to do this for that one reason and I really have to hammer out those things and not kid myself. If you can overcome that stuff, then it’s the road to something great, which, in my own mind, it should be. That’s the only thing you’re working for.”
Before he gets going again, though, Anton took the time to take on our Life & Times questionnaire. Why not have a listen to this sprawling BJM singles collection whilst you read? And remember, this edition is free but if you want to send some good wishes in the form of £5 our way to support TNC and get full access to every edition, you can do so by clicking Subscribe Now below.
Enjoy the edition, see you on Wednesday,
Ted and Niall
The Life & Times Of… Anton Newcombe
What was the first record you loved?
The Dusty Springfield song, The Look Of Love. There was a lot of that syrupy stuff when I was a little kid, Dusty Springfield but that was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Those guys were epic anyways but there was a lot of those kind of elevator, melodic jams, besides all the rock stuff.
What was the last record you loved?
Like a new album? Well, I just went to see Fontaines D.C., I thought they were shit hot and, more importantly, the people like them.
What’s your earliest memory?
It’s the qualities of dust in the air coming through the windows, the sun cutting through the warmth of the inside of a house.
What’s your daily domestic routine?
I like to be a creature of habit, a creature of pattern. Mostly right now, it’s revolving around me trying to motivate myself and to have a healthy head space. Seriously, because the world is bananas, but you don’t need to worry about that. It’s always been bananas. I’ve also been preparing for tour and trying to write more. You know, there’s so many bands that I loved since I was a kid from the 60s on and they maybe have one song or whatever. I might have sold ten times as many records and they’ve all this praise and legendary status that I’ve got none of. It’s amazing how that works.
Who or what is the love of your life?
It’s a good question. A good question that I can’t really answer. I mean, I love my kids.
What’s your worst habit?
I guess being against me. My temper. A lot of people are in your life in these weird situations, for instance, if you’re never in a bar, if you’re never on the high street on a Friday and Saturday night, you’re never going to get in one of these stupid fights, ever. It’ll never happen in a million years unless you’re in that area on that night. There’s a certain type of person that’s going to take shots at you your whole life. It’s not because you’ve done something. It’s because they’re showing other people that they’re not afraid of you but also it’s kind of like a trap that you can walk right into, because that that will happen from your first day of school until you’re much older. Even at my age, it would happen to me occasionally, somebody’s going to walk up and try and flip my hat off my head, say something, and it’s just knowing and staying out of those situations as much as possible, seeing it coming, ‘cos I travel all over the world, sometimes you just see it.
When were you most creatively satisfied?
Well, that’s the interesting thing about this stuff, music feels really good when you accomplish something but it’s so ephemeral. It’s like smoke, it just disappears. I think that’s good, but it’s bittersweet. I’m not into sport but I wish I could ask those guys from the English team from ’66. I know that people were buying them drinks until their livers exploded and all that shit but it would have been cool to ask them how long that actual buzz of the accomplishment felt because it goes away real quick.
That’s why they say ‘Don’t rest on your laurels’, because your laurels are just a bunch of leaves. They just turn into dust. It’s only Caesar that has gold leaves, ‘cos laurels are the shit on your crown, not a Fred Perry. That’s what his logo is symbolic of, being a champion, but you’re not supposed to rest on that. You’re supposed to go on to achieve more.
Has anyone you’ve ever met made you feel starstruck?
Not really. When I used to live in Laurel Canyon, I used to bump into Dylan at the Canyon store with Jakob’s son, his son’s son, getting him ice cream. I never said anything to him. I’d see him in his car, pulling up, I’d be pulling out of my driveway and he’d be coming up, because Jakob lived in the next house up. I never said anything like, ‘Oh, I’ve got a great studio, I love your music’, I just let it be. I used to bump into Ringo quite often, and what a great guy. That guy is exactly like you imagine him. But I don’t care about stars and all that stuff, celebrity.
Who or what is the greatest influence on your work?
I don’t think there’s a greatest. There’s just a lot of people that I personally respect. You pick up what you can from the bits and pieces, you collect things that make sense. It all fits in.
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
That I don’t really talk much, that I’m not partying all the time, that I have a perfect driving record since I was 16, no tickets, no accidents. I can even renew my driver’s license via mail. Doesn’t matter. I never have to go there again. I’m in the one percentile. I’m 57, it’s impressive. There’s over 30 something million people in the state of California. If you’re in the one percentile, that’s bananas.
What are you scared of?
I used to be scared that I would forget all these realisations that I had, you know, when you’re assembling the things that you understand about the universe and your mind and other people. It gets to a point when you’re a young person, if you’re on that path where you’re like, ‘I think got this’, you’re on your spiritual, mental, you’re on your own journey. You’ve got it figured out. ‘Okay, this is how people are, I’m not a sucker.’ You’ve got street wise, you got it all, you got relationships, you’ve mastered the school and everybody’s bullshit, and you’re different than all your mates and your mom, and you thank God for that. And you just don’t ever want to forget that, who you were that at that moment, because everybody seems like they get worn down by life.
What do you wish the 18-year-old you knew?
Well, it’s very strange, because I sacrificed my 20s, this, that and the other, working on stuff, but I wish I would have focused even more time on different things, applied myself. It’s a flip of the coin. I was quite old before it occurred to me that I could live in Europe. I moved from Southern California to San Francisco. When I moved away from home, I ended up moving back to Los Angeles, then to Portland. I lived in New York, in Manhattan, then I split, Iceland and Berlin and all these places but until I got to New York, I never knew that I could live anywhere. On the one hand, I could have made that leap earlier in my life quite easily, but I also wouldn’t have any of the things that I have. I wouldn’t have the music equipment, and I never would have done music.
What’s the secret to a long life?
Well, having had a double bypass at 57 I don’t know if I’m the right guy to ask. For some people, it’s being too stupid to die, too stubborn. Some people get lucky. They say to remain at actively engaged, because I’ll tell you what I noticed, a lot of people, they’re just fresh out of uni, or in their first year or something, and they’ve already died, whatever that was important inside about them before, that’s already died. I think it’s important to keep that spark in you. There’s nothing wrong with learning.
Do you mind getting older?
No. I always wanted to be a cool old man. It’s my own take on it and it’s fine. Everybody’s completely different. There’s so many people that fall into the same sort of blueprint. I just came back from California, you wouldn’t even believe how many people have trucks that are half as big as most people’s flats, half beach wear, giant truck. Everybody’s exactly the same and that’s not really living either.
What was the home that you grew up in like?
Horrible. My mom was rough. The people around me were rough, but that’s okay. The positive thing is when you grow up, you don’t perpetuate as many of these things as you can. If your pop smacked the shit out of you, if you don’t perpetuate that physical or mental violence on other people, I think that’s a real good thing.
If you could time travel, where would you go?
There’s abstract ways that you can time travel. For instance, I wrote my name in the cement that we poured in the back of my grandfather’s house. I thought when I was six years old, ‘If I come back here when I’m 18 and I look at this and remember that, my 18-year-old self that I’ve transported myself to will be time travel’. And I’ve done that abstractly. If you remember to go back to that place and look at that place with that one intention, it is time travel. When you have an accident - say you’re on a dirt bike or your bicycle and you fall and it seems like time slows down, you’re like, ‘Oh, my whole life flashed before my eyes’. The same thing happens when you have a heart attack and you’re in recovery or something and you’re recuperating. After my heart surgery, I was laying down for four months and it was like my whole life flashed before my eyes, except it was really slow. But it’s the same exact thing as the other times that I’ve wiped out on dirt bikes. Same exact thing, just as many thoughts. I found that to be fascinating, because I’ve never had that experience before. I’ve been in hospital before when I was a kid, really small, and I don’t remember having that reaction, because I guess I didn’t have a life before.
What’s the best advice you’ve been given?
I think it’s good to pay attention. I think it’s good when you look back, if you’ve had some people in your life that really tried, didn’t give up on trying to reach you. You should count yourself lucky, because there are people where nobody’s ever tried, or when they got a little bit squirrely, smashing windows or doing whatever teens do, to reel them back in.
Can you cook? What’s your signature dish?
I’m fascinated by cooking. It’s a science and it’s an art. You can follow the directions that other people have done before you and then you get your flair involved. You don’t really start out trying to screw everything up, trying to reinvent the way that people cook rice when people have been doing it for thousands of years. But after a while you can experiment with things. Good advice in cooking is less is more. Everything has its individual taste. That’s why French cooking and Japanese is strong.
Which living person do you most despise?
Despise and disrespect, being really skeptical and disappointed, all these things are connected together. But I’m not buying what Elon Musk is selling at all. It’s almost like a badge for something. Trump is like that too. It’s not his money, it’s like a badge for this thing that people invest in. It’s different than Dyson, this guy who’s doing all this stuff, not only was he an engineer but it’s his whole company, two different animals. Musk is Tesla, SpaceX, but that’s not the same as Dyson.
Do you have any phobias?
Not really, but I dealt with several people, great, great grandparents, with strokes. It’s just tough. We live in such a different world these days than me and my sisters coming up and my whole family taking care of them. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
What talent would you most like to have?
The ability to shut up.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I don’t have to define that really, I don’t think it’s important to even share that kind of stuff. We’ll see what lasts and what doesn’t. I think I’ve been very fortunate. It’s strange because you can’t really tell the music business straight out the gate to go to hell, go fuck themselves, ignore everything about how the status quo is and at the same time, expect a pat on the back and rewards and accolades. It doesn’t work that way. It’s one or the other. So that’s okay, and that’s something that will have to be figured out in the future. Dig!, the movie that that my group is in, 90% of the people watching something like that will look at something thirty years old and go, ‘Oh, well, this guy failed, because it says in the movie that he failed’. They don’t understand the record business doesn’t exist anymore. Their brain doesn’t compute that Capitol Records is boarded up. They don’t compute that out of all of my peers, there’s one or two people that just can even play music for the hell of it, like Paul Weller. Everybody else, they just come back every five years, ten years or twenty years. They’re not playing all the time.