Upon entering The Factory Theatre it was evident that The Brian Jonestown Massacre weren’t exactly having the best time on stage. They sounded great, don’t get me wrong, but they were just very listless on stage (except Ricky Maymi who looked like he might have been tripping judging from his Jim Morrison-esque snake dancing). It looked like they were just going through the motions, a criticism that has come back to me about a lot of their shows on this tour and which to me seem justified by this first impression. Oh sweet Jesus how very wrong I was.

The first half an hour of the show went on as described before, not much energy on stage, a few standout songs such as ‘Vacuum Boots’ got the crowd dancing, but then there were songs like ‘Anemone’ where the band, joined by a very drunk Aimee Nash from The Black Ryder, fell pretty flat on their ass, due in part to technical difficulties with mic levels and guitar effects. I had heard that Aimee was amazing at the Sunday show at The Metro (some people even said she was the highlight) but on this night I’m afraid she might have been a bit too drunk to sing. Thank god for the sound guy being quick on the reverb though.

About halfway through was when the show really picked up. Someone in the crowd yelled out ‘talk to us Anton?’ Anton, being Anton of course replied in calm tones that ‘I just don’t have that much to say.’ I love you was the response to the crowd to which Anton replied ‘I love you too,’ in the resigned tone of a father accepting an apology from his son for using his golf clubs to stage sword fights.

From that point onwards the music just got better and the band got more and more into it. It seems that Anton has got off the drink as the bottles of Stoli he had on the last tour were nowhere to be seen, and this means that we get more music from them, and a more fan friendly set list, but at the same time there is less fun. The last time they played The Factory Anton was yelling at people in the crowd, drinking vodka straight from the bottle, and at the end played an epic encore ending with Joel Gion refusing to leave the stage, having to be carried off after standing at the mic playing tambourine and saying things like ‘c’mon guy let’s start the revolution, we’re going keep playing till they cut the power off.’

There was none of that this time round, although Anton did have on moment of ranting:

Crowd: You need more guitarists…

Anton: Yeah really, I agree. I think we need about four more, got anyone in mind?

Crowd: Angus Young?

Anton: That’d be great, although talking about AC/DC, I heard that they played in Adelaide the other night to like 80,000 people or something and that they had ninety vans of gear. Ninety vans? I mean they’re a pub band right? They’re like the quintessential throw it in the back of the car and play type guys and now they have ninety vans? It’s fucking ridiculous.

The band then launched into a bollock jostling rendition of ‘Hide & Seek’ (at least I think that’s what it was) but either way it rocked, and Anton was only getting more in the mood as he jokingly talked off the mic with people in the front row.

Before I go on about the show I do want to mention The Factory Theatre and how awesome it is. What other venue in Sydney can you go to see a band like The Brian Jonestown Massacre and be right there at the stage with no barriers, and close enough to touch the musicians on stage? That plus the idea of a raised bar at the back so you can still see the band play while you get a drink, I mean genius, we need more of that. Mind you the prices are highway robbery and my Coopers Pale tasted like it had been strained through the urinary tract of a veteran street walker, but what the fuck, smuggle in a hippy, it still violently kicks the pants and ass off The Metro.

Anyway back to the matter at hand. By the last third of the show the band were hitting their stride like the battle scarred pros they are, and the crowd were loving it. Well, to be honest they had been loving it the whole time and were it not for the frequent calls of support and love I doubt the band would’ve got into as much as they did. I mean talking about a great crowd there was someone toward the front throwing flowers on stage for the band, so many in fact that by the end they had a vase full. That’s love.

Anton had to take a break to take a piss toward the end, leaving Matt Hollywood on stage to deal with the crowd begging for a song. ‘I don’t have any songs that are that short’ he replied, but Anton was soon back and launched into the music again, only to be held up by feed-backing mics. This had been happening all night but it was at the point that Anton just stopped the show that the problem got solved and the band were really able to flex their sonic muscles.

The last few songs were just amazing, and by this point I was too drunk and sweaty to remember the names, or even bother writing any more notes. They walked off stage and returned for an encore, which by popular crowd demand turned out to be ‘Swallowtail’, even though Anton professed to not really know how to play it anymore. Know how to play it he did, and throw down like an oiled up pro wrestler he did. He then grabbed the mic and starting have a real fucking sing, like he did in the footage from DiG! It was amazing. For the band to have gone from where they were at the start to spewing forth such beautiful wavering columns of melodious guitar noodling and wall of sound fuzz with such ease and poise was astonishing because, to be honest, I wasn’t sure they still had it in them. I thought they were just doing it for the money, treating it like a job, and while that very well maybe true about the greater part of the tour, for this show you could only say they played on the edge, dancing like crazy pedal wielding mystics on the brink between mediocrity and genius.

This show was amazing. When at their best, The Brian Jonestown Massacre are in the same league as the legendary bands which so influence them. Their music to me sounds like a delay riddled and joyous fog, through which you can see the suggestion of so much timeless and classic music yet which still alters the image enough for it to be new and different. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but they’re using it to tread the boundaries of where music has gone before, bringing back a few glittering nuggets of new found wisdom.

 

I dunno, maybe we just got along, but what unfolded was a forty five minute interview with a fascinating artist about… well, everything really.

Here is part one of that discussion:

And here’s part two:

Talented though they may be, their ballsy parade and general arrogance whether towards fans, interviewers or other rock stars cannot be denied. It could be argued that fans of Oasis (who you may remember as the band that professed to be bigger than The Beatles then ended up about as big as The Monkees) were as enamoured with the ‘fook off’-manner of the Gallagher brothers as they were with their mediocre records.

So if self-important arrogance and unwavering, almost pathological self-belief makes a real rock’n’roller then Anton Newcombe is easily a shining star. His dogged fidelity to his own genius has been his trademark since his early days of playing My Bloody Valentine recyclings with the then-foetal Brian Jonestown Massacre. His band quickly became notorious in underground circles for their live performances. Not all of them, just the ones where Anton kicks the fans’ heads in or fires band members after on-stage brawls.

These shows collapsed before the first song was finished and though for the most part shows would be glitch free, audiences were always eager to see the dysfunctional antics of The Anton Newcombe Show. These incidents, coupled with a prolific album output and an eschewing of the usual record company mechanics cemented Newcombe’s place as an underground messiah. It’d be a fair assessment to say that for the majority of the 90s, The Brian Jonestown Massacre would consistently crumble under the weight of Newcombe’s own self-mythologising.

The band is now touring after the release of their tenth LP Who Killed Sgt. Pepper? which follows My Bloody Underground – an aggressively titled and aggressively mediocre record in which Newcombe staked his claim as the creator and proprietor of an ungrateful underground scene. On the new LP the cover, the album title, the song titles (which look like demo names Newcombe never bothered changing) and the track lengths are all classic BJM. It’s beyond my skill as a writer to sum up the album better than Newcombe himself did in an ’08 interview when discussing My Bloody Underground: “We just made them up as we were going on, took a bunch of drugs, did some more on the end of a track…” The formula doesn’t seem to have changed much between albums.

Like many songwriters (your Dylans, your Lennons and Jones’) Newcombe shines when he’s wounded. The broken hearted 1960s echoes you hear on ‘Nevertheless’ and ‘Open Heart Surgery’ are the product of a truly musical mind, albeit an ill one. But on these recent albums it seems he’s just not trying any more and the complacency is explicit.

Standing in line outside the Billboard I’m surrounded by, seemingly, quite a few Dandy Warhols fans (the t-shirts are a dead giveaway). It’s not surprising; the two bands have been virtually interchangeable in the public mind since the release of a certain documentary a few years back. After the standard pre-gig lingering, a few hundred punters make their way inside the venue, ready to witness DiG! On Ice.

The current BJM lineup is as close to the “classic lineup” as the band has been for some time. Previously estranged original band members Joel Gion (who gets his very own round of applause) and Matt Hollywood have returned to the band that first made them veritable indie namedrops.

As far-flung scenes of desert valleys and flowing tides of prescription pills stream across the screens behind them, the band gives the audience what they want: the methodroning guitars of ‘Wasted’, ‘That Girl Suicide’, ‘When Jokers Attack’ and other highlights of their prolific, turbulent career.

Matt Hollywood takes center stage and the set list features many Hollywood-penned songs including (inevitably) everyone’s favourite ‘Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth’. Newcombe, for the most part, scarcely gazes at the audience. Occasionally you catch him giving a curmudgeonly stare or knowing smile. More often than not he just he keeps to the side, with the microphone positioned for the least facial exposure possible, and takes lead on the songs which he must take lead on. Newcombe is now officially in the band, he no longer is the band.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s records have always been, for me, tinted bittersweet – the band members that appear on an album’s credits often aren’t the members that appear on the next. The wavering faux English voice that croons through songs like ‘The Devil May Care (Mom and Dad Don’t)’ and ‘If Love Is The Drug Then I Want To OD’ paints a haunting tableau. It takes a live context to force the kind of vivacity the songs deserve – the vigour and energy courses through every tune though the band may barely move.

While the lineup harks back to the halcyon (heroin?) days, the dynamic of the band is not the same as before. Most importantly, a different Anton Newcombe straps on his hollow body Gretsch. It’s an Anton far removed from the “junkie fall down, make funny” times of old. His ability to craft tender, honest pieces like ‘Open Heart Surgery’ despite a serious messianic complex would often make one wonder if he was the modern era’s Brian Jones or Charlie Manson. But while Anton will always be a guitar-strumming runaway boy with a serious Barrettesque crack in the cosmic eggshell – a lifetime of mass drug use and mass indifference from others creates a monster – at least now he’s not kicking anyone’s head in.

Dan Clarke managed the damn-near impossible on Monday afternoon, interviewing the man himself Anton Newcombe for a staggering forty five minutes. Keep an eye out tomorrow for a podcast of that conversation.

Presented as a fan-made music video (and endorsed on the official BJM website) it was created by amateur directors the tomjoetwins, and features not only a zombie holocaust, but one that was animated stop-motion style IN LEGO! It’s not perfectly synced, and runs twenty seconds or so long, but god damn… Zombies, Lego and the BJM?!

Check it out:

Oh, and we might have forgotten to mention that the Brian Jonestown Massacre will be playing a second show in Sydney on the 3rd March at the Factory Theatre. Click here for tickets.

Working with musicans of the likes of Will Carruthers (ex Spacemen 3 & Spiritualized), Unnur Andrea Einarsdottir (who recorded vocals on the last BJM album) & Felix from the Russian band “Amazing Electronic Talking Cave” and various musicians from France, Germany, & Iceland, this is BJM’s most multi-cultured and inspired release to date.

Thirteen tracks ranging from ambient bhangra beats, to rock, to shoegaze, to the gypsy influences of Eastern Europe and then back again to the swirling psychedelia that has won the band a devoted legion of followers around the globe, Who Killed Sergeant Pepper is a high water mark in a career full of brilliant releases.

Australian fans will not only be the first territory to receive the album, but will also receive the bonus EP ‘One’ with their copy of the album.

Who Killed Sergeant Pepper is out February 6th, 2010 on a recordings LTD/Inertia.

To celebrate the release of Who Killed Sergeant Pepper, the Brian Jonestown Massacre have announced they will be heading to Australia in 2010. With the addition of Matt Hollywood, this is as close to the original line up as we are ever going to see on stage.

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2010

Thursday 18th February
The Zoo, Brisbane
Tix through oz tix -phone sales 1300 762 545, www.thezoo.com.au, Rockinghorse Records (City), Kill The Music (City), Butterbeats (City & Valley)

Friday 19th February
Playground Weekender Festival, Wisemans Ferry

Sunday 21st February
Billboard The Venue, Melbourne
Tix through www.moshtix.com.au and missing link records, polyester records

Tuesday 23rd February
Fowlers Live, Adelaide
Tix through www.moshtix.com.au

Thursday 25th February
Capitol, Perth
Tix: www.moshtix.com.au, www.bocs.com.au, 78 Records, Mills Records & Planet

Sunday 28th February
Metro Theatre, Sydney
Tickets available at Metro Box office 624 George Street Sydney, www.ticketek.com.au and www.metrotheatre.com.au

Saturday 6th March
The Lost Weekend Festival, Brisbane

Tix on sale Tuesday 1st December.

We broke the news of a new album and upcoming Australian tour a few weeks ago, and we’re stoked to finally hear some new music coming out of the BJM camp. We’re still digesting the new tracks here at the Music Feeds offices, but suffice to say it’s another step forward from a band never satisfied with resting on their laurels.

The more diehard fans might notice that a lot of these tracks have surfaced already in certain Youtube channels, and indeed some are re-imaginings of previously recorded tracks. Newcombe himself first started posting links to some of these songs during his short lived activity on Facebook, while presumably recording the tracks in Iceland. The last we heard before that account was deleted was that Anton was heading to London to finish recording material for the album.

Head over to Brianjonestownmassacre.com for the full album, but for now here’s a little teaser. It’s track number 6 on the album, entitled This Is The One Thing We Did Not Want To Have Happen.

Who Killed Sgt. Pepper will be the tenth official studio album release from the BJM (although there are a few choice bootlegs and unreleased albums floating around the Internet…)

Stay tuned to Music Feeds for full details of the upcoming BJM Australian tour, including the Playground Weekender festival, soon.

UPDATE: A new Brian Jonestown Massacre album will be released on January 1st, 2010 (01.01.10… geddit?). The current working title is Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?

In August we were told by a little birdy (it might have been Anton himself, we’re still not sure), that Brian Jonestown would return to Australia in the summer of 2010. Along with a promise of a new Album.

Brian Jonestown Massacre will play The Playground Weekender Festival, taking place between the 18th and 21st of February. No sideshows have been announced yet, but we’re positive that sideshows will be likely.

Stay tuned for more info soon(ish).

(Illustration by Benjamin Johnson)

Billed as a world premiere, it was forwarded along with the promise of a new album on the 1st January, 2010. In an associated item, Anton has said that the Brian Jonestown Massacre will be touring Australia in “Summer 2010.” [confirmed: Playing Playground Weekender 2010] As to when and where exactly, we’re not sure but stay tuned for updates.

(Illustration by Benjamin Johnson)

Having struck up one hell of a deal whereby they can release their album in their own label but with the backing of EMI Music Australia The Black Ryder are laughing all the way to a unique new view of how labels and artists can work together.

If you haven’t heard them yet do yourself a favour and click here before the Gods of psychedelia and shoegaze come down from their hash party in the sky and smite you down. Using looping, distortion, reverb and delay to great effect The Black Ryder construct waering spires of blissful noise all over laced with haunting female vocals a la My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

But aside from the music’s stunning and subtle beauty, what makes this album special is the way it’s being released. Speaking of the landmark agreement between their own independent label The Anti-Machine Machine Aimée Nash explained that “Since the inception of this project we’ve felt very passionately about allowing the music and everything that surrounds it to evolve in it’s most natural (and for the most part unconventional) form.”

“This new initiative with Original Matters & EMI Music will allow us to release the album we always wanted to release on our own (newly created) label. To have their support in releasing our album in such a unique way is the best possible outcome we could have hoped for. To say we’re pleased or excited by this outcome would be an understatement. We’re very proud to be apart of this new initiative & direction.”

The first appetizer from the forthcoming banquet of an album is the track Burn & Fade, which features friends Peter Hayes (vox) & Leah Shapiro (drums) of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, & Mr. Ricky Maymi (guitars / raagini) of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Hit the band’s MySpace at www.myspace.com/theblackryder asap and prepare to feel blissy.

Catch THE BLACK RYDER performing live in July at the following venues:

Friday July 24 SPECTRUM, Oxford Street Sydney
With guests ‘Stammer’ featuring Millie Hall (Bridezilla) + Holiday Sidewinder (Bridezilla) + Luke O’Farrell (The Laurels)
Tickets available at www.moshtix.com.au & Moshtix outlets

Friday July 31 CHERRY BAR, ACDC Laneway Melbourne
With guests The Demon Parade + Transnational
Tickets available at the door

The debut album from The Black Ryder available in October 2009