In the afterglow of Jane’s Addiction‘s public flameout after Perry Farrell threw a punch at Dave Navarro onstage, band fights are all the rage. In a cosmic coincidence, days before Farrell’s fighting in Boston, The Brian Jonestown Massacre singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer/sole permanent member Anton Newcombe reemerged from exile following a band brawl of his own doing to sit for an interview with The Times and say hold my sitar, motherf–er.
If there is something non-musical Anton Newcombe is known for aside from outlandish facial hair, it’s fighting his bandmates. The groundbreaking 2004 documentary Dig! charted the parallel courses of the staunchly independent BJM, who seemed to sabotage themselves at every turn, and the more commercially driven The Dandy Warhols, who achieved success at the cost of their artistic fulfillment. Filmed over seven years, it also captured one brawl after another within the Brian Jonestown Massacre as Newcombe fought bandmates, audience members, and—most often—himself as he struggled with emotional instability and substance abuse.
Though the interview with The Times occurred prior to the Jane’s Addiction squabble, Newcombe did answer for his combatant and volatile history onstage.
“You know what? I’m human. I do say a bunch of weird shit when I’m inebriated,” Newcombe told the interviewer about a 2023 show in Brighton, England where he spent most of the evening berating the sound man until his bandmates left the stage in protest. As for the show in Melbourne, Australia not long after where Newcombe got into an onstage fight with guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt which caused an abrupt end to the show and the tour, he said, “That was after playing 50 shows in a row, I was dealing with a knucklehead of a drummer, and mostly I was trying to keep things under control. I’m trying to stop this horrible s–t from happening, and yet I still get blamed for every damn thing.”
Pressed as to why he has such a propensity to fight his bandmates, Newcombe relented that not everyone is operating at the same level of professionalism as he is. “OK, I’ll give you an example,” he said with a deep inhale, preparing to defend himself. “There was one concert in London where people in my band were higher than the sun after taking a load of ecstasy. Someone chucks a microphone stand at an audience member and I’m not having it.”
As Jane’s Addiction is on its way out (at least for now), Brian Jonestown Massacre is on its way back in. Following Newcombe’s double bypass surgery in February, the band just announced a three-week tour of the U.K. and Europe, its first since its rumble Down Under. Oasis, another band famous for its tiffs on and offstage, is also coming back to England next year. The Brian Jonestown Massacre opened for the then-budding Britpop superstars on their first U.S. tour in 1994 and played an important role in Oasis’ infamous “meth show” at the Whiskey a Go Go, hailed by many as the band’s worst concert ever.
“Noel Gallagher is standing there as we’re doing 15-minute songs, not getting into our psychosexual thing at all, and then I told him that Oasis sounded like Guns N’ Roses,” Newcombe said of the friction between BJM and Oasis. “Joel [Gion, BJM’s tambourine-playing provocateur] gave them some crazy speed and they were up for the next three days.”
Though Newcombe has had his own issues with substance abuse, he’s thankful his struggles happened in the ’90s before the widespread proliferation of fentanyl in street drugs. He credited an unlikely source with helping him on his sobriety journey, before characteristically throwing others under the bus (so much for accepting the things we cannot control).
“I got caught up in heroin in the late ’90s, but I stopped by just stopping,” Newcombe said. “Richard Lewis was my sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous and he was exactly like he was in Curb Your Enthusiasm: a neurotic Jewish guy. A lot of other people in Dig! are still using to this day.”
Through the ups and downs of critical acclaim, substance abuse, health scares, band fights, and much more, at 57 years old Newcombe remains as stubborn and hard-nosed as he was when Dig! shocked rock audiences and cemented BJM as icons of the underground.
“Everything about my life has been an uphill struggle,” Newcombe said. “We play three hours every night, like Taylor Swift, but she has an army of people to help her and she’s aerobically fit while I have my health concerns to think about. I’m currently working on two albums at once. Each day I go into battle with my insecurity and self-doubt.”
Check out the full interview here.
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