It was a few minutes after 9 as Anton Newcombe strolled onto the stage at the Albert Hall, accompanied by his cadre of musicians, on his head a wide-brimmed pork pie hat taken straight from the cover of Desire. A deep red lighting backlights the group as they take their positions, altering mic positions and tightening guitar straps, seeping from the stage and enveloping the first few ranks of an expectant crowd.
A tambourine crashes for the first (but by no means last) time of the evening, as the opening chords of 2023’s ‘Maybe Make It Right’ thunder out from high-stacked guitar amps. Newcombe drawls the opening phrase into a microphone not quite turned up enough to produce sounds lyrically distinguishable amongst the thick din of percussion and rhythm guitar, the first in a sequence of events which, under other circumstances, may have been unenjoyable, but under the helmsmanship of Brian Jonestown Massacre simply fed into a sense of pleasant chaos – nobody seems 100% sure of what was going on, and nobody seems to care.
The mutton-chopped percussionist Joel Gion tosses one of his many tambourines, James-Bond-style, onto a stand a few feet away, and selects a replacement, in a moment of quiet between numbers. Now, tell anybody who knows that you’re going to a BJM concert and you’ll likely be told to expect a certain amount of onstage bickering over timings and tunings – maybe it’s because it was Valentine’s Day and there was love in the air, but there was not as much in-band quarrelling as might have been expected. It was only after playing the first twenty seconds of ‘That Girl Suicide’ that the first affected restart occurred, with the band throwing up their arms as Newcombe reins them in to begin from the top. “I just want it to be perfect for you guys”, Newcombe tells the crowd to cheers and applause. Is the staccato stop-starting a genuine desire for artistic perfection, or is it a performance gimmick? After all, you’d have thought that after thirty years they would have their timings down. But who really cares? It’s part of the BJM experience, and it’s entertaining.
One thing that stands out about the music of this group is its lack of temporality, it’s hard to place any particular song in any particular era. Their (massive) discography itself covers many bases, from shoegaze and dream-pop, to 60’s style psychedelic rock, to their experimental production of more recent years, but in the room, on the night, it would be hard for the untrained ear to pin any number down to a certain moment in time. At no point could a layman think with any real certainty, “This is one of their older ones“, or “Ah, a new one”. The whole set in fact takes on the sense of being one long, winding song, bobbling over sonic moguls and sweeping around musical chicanes.
A three-song run of hits in the middle of the set gets the crowd moving, ‘Anemone’, ‘Pish’, and ‘Nevertheless’, spark tripped-out moves from some of the more middle aged men in the crowd that can be described only as a product of the ‘stoned-Bez’ school of dance – infectious. Newcombe gazes out from behind the tint of his Wayfarer sunglasses, his adoption of eyewear copied by the entirety of the band – one may wonder, however, whether his specs were photochromatic, he was stood pretty close to his lyrics sheet, after all.
There are few constants at a BJM performance, but one is the ever-presence of driving, tumbling drums which carry the band through. It is perhaps from behind the kit that the sense of rolling syncopation of their live gigs is conceived, lending as they do an almost shamanic percussive bedrock.
BJM seem to walk consistently fine lines: unrehearsed or intentionally chaotic? Uninterested or ultra-cool? Monotonous or hypnotic? The lines are fine, but the group always falls on the right side of them. Their performance was trance-like, musicians appearing seemingly at random, drums being played with maracas, and two hours filled to the brim with hazy reverie.
