An interview with Anton from May 16 via
Getting lost in the idea with The Brian Jonestown Massacre | BeatRoute Magazine -“I’m working on two brand new albums,” explains Anton Newcombe over the phone from Berlin. “I wrote 45 songs at once. One record is exactly how you would expect The Brian Jonestown Massacre to sound, and the other is what I think it sounds like, closer to what I think it should be.”
-“I’m a conceptual artist,” says Newcombe, “in that I get lost in the idea. I don’t record things so that they’ll be perfect. I make music that lives or dies in the medium. Doing things lo-fi was a practicality. I didn’t need permission to make records or music. I kept all my publishing, I own all my records. A lot of the bands from that time sold their publishing for essentially a mortgage, maybe a cute sports car, and where are they now? No one’s gonna reissue those records.”
“See, I’m into creating a culture where people are themselves. Like, even Dylan, in the early days, was just being Woody, and that was kind of lame or whatever, but someone could dress like Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, and unless they take the myth to that end like a complete idiot, they’re still themselves. That was the power of punk and post-punk, it was folk, because you were yourself immediately.”
-“Tess is a force of nature. She has a very malleable style, and at the same time, she’s always herself. I asked her to sing ‘Five to One’ by The Doors, and if you closed your eyes, it was a spooky comparison, which is really hard to do, but she’s just such a powerful artist. I was reading about her in a magazine and she dropped BJM as a point of reference, and I just found her and said, ‘Why don’t you come to Berlin and work with me?’”
-Newcombe has spent the last nine years in Berlin, a move he attributes to “the damage in my consciousness of being American. I was living in Manhattan, which, you know that Sinatra line, ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’? Well, that’s just not true. Manhattan’s a shithole for the most part, to be honest. America’s been at war my entire life, and it’s like, no one cares, just which country are we going to invade to run a pipeline through?”
-“[Berlin] It’s a very culturally advanced place. Berlin puts a billion dollars a year into the arts, because that’s what they want to be known for. Here, it’s okay, as an artist, to be any age, and it’s affordable enough to have a family, where young people in America are wondering how they could ever afford college for their kids. I don’t even play here, I don’t need a scene to support me, I go out on the road, and we do well there.”
#berlin #tessparks #brianjonestownmassacre #bjm #levitation #antonnewcombe