Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe talks new material and getting “blamed for everything”

Anton Newcombe has spoken to NME about All Seeing Dolls – his new project with Dot Allison – as well as his recent health scare, his time spent with Anthony Bourdain, and what fans can expect from upcoming UK tour with Brian Jonestown Massacre.

The singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer launched the new project with Allison with the single ‘That’s Amazing Grace’ — an ethereal, My Bloody Valentine-inspired track and the first preview of upcoming album, ‘Parallel’.

“I think it brings something different from each of my other projects. She wrote most of the songs during COVID and I told her, ‘If you want to do music like that, I’m the only dude in the world [who can contribute]. I’ve got that vibe down, it’s in my soul,’” Newcombe told NME.

“It’s her, sitting on her couch with an acoustic guitar. She has a really great voice and out of the stack of recordings she sent me, there was only one I didn’t like. [For the rest,] the first thing I said was: ‘I’m not even going to so much as cut, trim, rearrange or remix any of this stuff. I want to completely build a whole world around this feeling of her sitting on her couch’.”

He added: “It was just a pleasure and it took a while to do because there’s a lot of really weird stuff. Every song on it is completely different and I can’t wait for people to hear it. I think it will end up in movies because it has this thing that people on laptops don’t have. I’m not knocking [that], but this feels like a whole world we’ve created.”

New material with All Seeing Dolls also comes as ‘90s shoegaze icons Brian Jonestown Massacre recently dropped a new single ‘Don’t Look At Me’ featuring Aimee Nash, and are preparing to hit the road again for their first shows since their 2023 Australia tour came to an abrupt and violent end.

Check out the full interview below, where Newcombe tells us how his approach to songwriting has changed after three decades, his thoughts on the 20th anniversary of Dig!, and how he’s overcome both health concerns and tensions with bandmates ahead of the UK tour.

NME: Hi Anton. Tell us about the new single with Aimee Nash, ‘Don’t Look At Me’. How does it represent where Brian Jonestown Massacre are now?  

Anton Newcombe: “It was one I was sitting on for a little while, and the collaboration with Aimee came as I’ve known her for a long time and I always want to work with her more. It was really nice to be able to finally get it done.

“It was meant to be something different. In the writing process, I did a totally different vocal scratch and told her, ‘Do me a favour and don’t copy me. This is just to show you when there are vocals’. Anyway, she must’ve heard me wrong and thought it was a duet! So when I got the tracks back, I was like, ‘Oh, crap, this is all completely wrong.  This is exactly what I didn’t want!’ But then I stopped for a second, started chopping it up, and realised that it was actually really interesting that way.”

Brian Jonestown Massacre have released an impressive 20 studio albums and 14 EPs now. Has your approach towards songwriting changed since you started out?

“When I’m writing music, I try not to have creative blocks because I’m never going for a radio hit or anything, so I’ll just write whatever I feel. It could be country, it could be disco. It doesn’t matter. I keep an open mind and just let it flow. The only thing [I’ve retained] since the very beginning is to try and complete the idea.

“Another thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t view what I do in the same way as other people. My friends quite often talk me into releasing songs. I’ll be playing something for them that I might have been sitting on forever, and to me, it’s just something that I like. I’m not motivated by the thought of ‘Oh my gosh, people are going to love this one. This is going to be my landmark high point.’ But sometimes it’ll be my friends who go ‘This is insane. You have to put this out. You have to share this. People will love this.’”

Last time you were on the road an on-stage physical altercation between you and a bandmate led to the Australian tour ending prematurely. What happened for things to escalate like that?

“I’ll tell you the truth, but I don’t want to encourage this. Somebody threw a glass at me. I’m pretty good at dodging that stuff, but then the other guy in the group at the time – he’s no longer in the group – threw another bottle or glass back into the audience. It was in a nice auditorium, so I was asking security to intervene because you don’t want it to descend into chaos. I was trying to get security, the promoters, tour managers, anybody just to get this guy off the stage, and nobody paid attention.

“So I just told him ‘You have to put down that guitar and beat it. You can’t be [going around] like Pete Doherty, you can’t be throwing stuff into the audience.’ I’ve already been there before and I’ve tackled people in my band… I didn’t tackle this guy though. Those guys I was calling for came after me.

“It’s happened before. You know what though? Ultimately, what happens is the buck stops with me. Some people think ‘None of this stuff would happen if you just quit playing music’. I get blamed for everything.”

What’s the chemistry like between the members now? 

“Most of the time it’s pretty good, but that run was quite difficult because we did like 50 shows in a row. In the past we’ve done like 160 shows nonstop and, if the communication is bad between management and there are other things we need to do [outside of the band], it’s a lot.

“We’re not playing a little when we go out there, we go all out. Even if you compare it to what a big deal this Oasis tour coming up is… Yes, they’re playing really big places, but we play a billion more smaller shows. We do 18 big shows in Australia, but they’ll do a couple of massive shows, so it’s totally different worlds. We still play a lot more than most of our peers. Most people just [can’t] do it like that.”

While we’re on the topic, what are your thoughts on the Oasis reunion? 

“I think it’s good for business. Even if they’re just doing it for money, it’s good that the members and their respective management camps could talk about it before they were too old. Do it while it still means something. I don’t really put too much stock in this ‘Greatest rock band in the world’ stuff. I don’t care about that, I just want to see good music.

“I know that the people who love them really love them. To me though, the interesting thing was that, all of a sudden, they’ve got all these young 19-year-olds like ‘I gotta be there!’ Everyone got in line for tickets. It was like all these people who couldn’t care less about lions, tigers and elephants were now sitting on their couch going, ‘Oh my god, tomorrow night the circus will be in town. That’s where everybody’s going to be, so I have to go too!’ It’s really weird. I mean, even Levi’s is selling Oasis t-shirts now.”

You went through some serious health concerns recently. How are you feeling now?

“I had some kind of heart event and I had to have an operation. It was early last year but, when you do open heart surgery, that’s pretty much it for the year for you. It takes a long time to bounce back, if you do. There was a lot of stuff I had to sort out in my head around that time – different things to unpack. A lot of it was how I viewed myself. I used to think I was such a young 56, right? I didn’t care if my eyebrows went grey because I was thin and active and had [been through] that crazy, shoot-em-up, drinking-whiskey lifestyle.

“If you have a bypass when you’re 70-years-old and doctors tell you ‘You can live 20 more years with this condition’, it’s easy! You’ll be 90 and that’s fucking great, right? But if you’re 50 and they tell you you could live 20 more years with it, all of a sudden that’s not long left at all. It was a lot to unpack and I had to ask myself ‘Do I even want to do this… continue living and getting better or not? This world is kind of depressing, is this even worth it?’ Everything crosses your mind and your whole life flashes before your eyes.”

Do you think it will affect your approach to touring? 

“It already has. I’ve never really cared too much about a lot of comforts and I don’t need much on the road. I’m happy, and it has nothing to do with my money. We have nice tour buses and stuff, but now we’re going to take more days off. For instance, when we’ve toured the whole world in the past it usually took us two years and we were playing three hours a night. That’s not gonna happen anymore. We’re still really playing when we’re on stage though. That’s not gonna change.”

You’ve spoken openly about your time with Anthony Bourdain in the past. With a new biopic about him on the way, what is something you hope that filmmakers capture accurately?

“I talked to some people after he passed away and I tried to explain my take on hanging out with him for three days. To me, he seemed really two-dimensional. I know a lot of really successful, famous people, and I’ve never seen anybody like that. It was like staring at the corner of a building and, you know that the other side of the building’s there, but you can’t see it at all. It was a really strange feeling.

“At first I thought, well, maybe this is just [a] persona… maybe he just knows when to turn it on, but it wasn’t that. I couldn’t put my finger on it the whole time. I asked other people that had been with him on the TV show [Parts Unknown] and they were like: ‘Everybody in New York is like that’… Everybody in New York isn’t like that. When I tell you that I’ve never met anybody like that, I mean it. You should believe it because I’ve met a lot of people.

“So, to wrap it up. It would be nice to see if they nail anything about that in the film, and to see if they go into depth about what was going on at the end. I personally know a little bit, but I’ve never seen anything [around that tackled]. I want to see how far they get towards investigating the end part of it.”

We’re coming up to the 20th anniversary of Dig!. Looking back, what’s your mindset towards the documentary? 

“I’ve never seen Dig! I saw a film that was compiled at the lawyer’s office beforehand, because they wanted a festival licence so they could show it at Sundance. They didn’t have releases, not from me, not Courtney [Taylor-Taylor, The Dandy Warhols frontman]… they didn’t have anybody’s! So they ended up having to re-edit something else because they sold the thing immediately. Looking back at Dig!, the movie everybody else has seen is a different movie to what I saw, to a certain extent. I have my own beef with it and I don’t need to talk about it too much.

“Dig! has its own life that augments every time both of us [Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols] go on tour. I don’t reflect on anything like that though. I’m really forward-thinking and I’m looking forward to all these upcoming shows in the UK. We’re playing a lot of places way bigger than we’ve ever played before – and it’s certainly not because of the 20th anniversary of Dig! It has nothing to do with that crap. We’ve slugged it out and I can’t tell you how many times we’ve sold out The Barrowlands in Scotland or something. That has nothing to do with Dig! being re-released or whatever.”

All Seeing Doll’s debut album ‘Parallel’ is set for release in February 2025, and Brian Jonestown Massacre will embark on a UK and European tour in the new year. Visit here for tickets and more information.

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