Tortured genius
Charles Spencer
Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culturevulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she did.
After spending long days looking at great art and great architecture, you might have thought the spirit would crave the most beautiful classical music in the evening. Indeed I took along some favourite CDs of Haydn and Mozart for just such an eventuality. But I found that in my few brief periods of time off for good behaviour on the fresco trail, I wanted nothing more than to listen to the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Regular readers may remember that I mentioned the band last month following their appearance at Guilfest when the band’s notoriously temperamental leader, Anton Newcombe, accused the laid-back Surrey audience of being one of the most boring he’d ever played to, and turned his back on them for most of the set. As I have since discovered this was impeccable manners by his lights. In his time he’s been arrested and banged up for three days for kicking a member of the audience viciously in the head, while walkouts and on-stage fights between band members have regularly enlivened their sets. More than three dozen musicians have passed through the ranks since the group’s formation in the early Nineties, with Newcombe the only continuous presence, though his delightfully goofy, heroically good-natured tambourine player, Joel Gion, has been along for most of the turbulent ride.
All this and much more is chronicled in a brilliant documentary film called Dig! (2004), now available for under a tenner on Amazon and which I cannot recommend too highly. It tells the contrasting stories of two American bands, The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, once good friends, then increasingly bitter enemies as the stock of the former rose while the latter continued to languish in obscurity.
The director, Ondi Timoner, spent seven years following both groups, and at times her movie, laconically narrated by Courtney Taylor, lead singer with the Dandies, is as funny and preposterous as anything in that great spoof rockumentary This is Spinal Tap. There are drug busts and screaming temper tantrums, doomed tours and the clash of monstrous egos. But this warts-and-all documentary is also desperately sad. For there is no doubt that Newcombe is some kind of twisted genius whose own troubled and abrasive personality has constantly undermined the success his talent deserves. Wildly temperamental, often vile-tempered and for periods of the movie a scuzzy heroin addict, he makes wonderful music inspired by the heady days of the summer of love, the Stones in their glory days, the British shoe-gazing scene and his own personal obsessions.
It is, as one unusually perceptive A&R man observes in the film, music that seems simultaneously to look backwards into the past and forwards into the future, and once you’ve got the taste for it you begin to crave it. Drenched in guitars, with wasted vocals, haunting melodies, Eastern drones and a sense of spaced-out adventure, the music of the Brian Jonestown Massacre appeals to me in a way no other rock band has since the Smiths.
One former manager wearily describes Newcombe as ‘so horrible, in so many ways’, but even those with most cause to loathe him bear witness to his talent in Dig! And there is something strangely admirable about his cussedness, his messianic self-belief and the warped sense of humour witnessed in his inspired name for the band, his hilarious sleeve notes and such album titles as Their Satanic Majesties Second Request and Thank God for Mental Illness. The band’s latest album My Bloody Underground may be a serious disappointment in comparison with former glories, but it’s hard to resist a record that features an opening track called ‘Bring me the Head of Paul McCartney on Heather Mills’s Wooden Peg’.
The best place to start with the Brian Jonestown Massacre is with the movie Dig! and the superb double CD retrospective Tepid Peppermint Wonderland (also available on Amazon) where for once Newcombe has steered clear of his usual self-sabotaging tendencies and picked the band’s most appealing and accessible music. If you are anything like me, however, you will then want to collect the entire, criminally neglected back catalogue. Newcombe strikes me as perhaps the most fascinating cult figure in rock music since Syd Barrett, whose work he delightfully pastiches on a song called ‘My Man Syd’. I just hope that, unlike Pink Floyd’s lost leader, Anton somehow manages to keep making music while finding a measure of the serenity that has always eluded him so far.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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