There is a first time for everything, but some firsts split your life in two. Before any of it, before the gigs, the distortion and the red haze, I was in a godforsaken place in China. Winter, 2003. A grey, industrial maze. Everyone I knew was miserable, including myself. It was the kind of place that eats away at your mental health in slow, invisible ways.
The place was thick with quiet despair, like a factory fog you could not escape. Then there was the dragging cold. Constant, inescapable, and exhausting. Distinct and penetrating discomfort. Longing for heat that never really came.
Then one day, a gift with a small note arrived in the mail. “Lea, you need to hear this”. From my brother, half the globe away. The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Thank God For Mental Illness.
A transmission from another dimension. Uniquely, the first breath after silent drowning.
Long, glowing fibres unwound themselves from the spinning disc and stitched themselves straight into my nervous system. And that is the exact beauty about it. Rare noise does not just speak to you. It shocks you back into your own skin.
That was my first encounter with Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
The second time was in Copenhagen, Store Vega, 2006, the first time they played in Denmark. It was also the first time I was rude to a fellow stranger. Standing way in the back, I pushed forward until I was right in front of the stage.
An angry voice shouted down my neck, “Hey! You can’t just jump in front of me. I’ve waited two months for this”.
“Fuck off!” I said, “I’ve waited my whole life.”
Had I really been waiting my whole life? Of course, I had. The room was packed to the brim, cloaked in a haze of distortion and red light, and it felt like everything was happening just beyond the veil of ordinary perception.
Revelation. A fix straight to the eyeball. Total sonic surrender.
This was not just a gig. Life as we knew it changed, and everything shifted after that. Anton and The Brian Jonestown Massacre had cracked the Heavens open. They hurled a hurricane from another dimension of new life straight into our young, already black, tar-glazed lungs, and we breathed it in like it was salvation.
Watching Anton leading and commanding the chaos like a prophet drunk on feedback, I felt it. It was in his eyes, too. Standing before me was someone walking the razor’s edge between genius and madness. I say that, with the utmost respect and admiration. Anton and BJM, in its current and former incarnations, have given us more than we could ever fully understand.
Just the other night, and almost two decades later, I stood there again. This time inside the dim-lit womb of Amager Bio. A room swollen with anticipation.
Ghosts I once knew. Strangers I met. Bruised hearts still beating. Lungs inked with time. Hands shaking. Beer sweating. The floor breathing beneath us. Static. Feedback. A low hum of something familiar waking.
Then the distortion broke like a wave. Captivated by the all-encompassing singular world Anton so meticulously and noisily has built and fiercely protected. A world that, despite its no-norms, massive storms, or exactly because of the massive storms and no-norms, continues to impact in a way that very few do.
The night unfolded at a slower and deeper pace than some might have expected. Just because your eyes are open, it does not mean you can see. Listen.
The light had wholesomely shifted, like dusk catching gold on old stone. Still Anton. Still the current beneath the chaos. But grounded. Present. Stripped back to the essence. There was calm now. Clarity. A kind of honest, hard-earned peace vibrating through his voice. It was like watching someone return to their own skin after years of exile.
He moved like someone who had finally made peace with the storm. Time had done its work. It all came together. The demons had found someone else to live by. That was incredibly freeing to witness.
Time bends. The sound evolves. The trip continues.
Unflinching, he goes his own way, making no attempt to follow the steps.
What you never said, said everything.
All these years, album by album, tour after tour and gig after gig, that is what Anton has been doing all along – letting us in on his secret:
Absolutely everything rock ‘n’ roll was ever meant to be.
