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Tortured genius

Charles Spencer

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Charles Spencer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre

All this and much more is chronicled in a brilliant documentary film called Dig! (2004), now available for under a tenner on Amazon and which I cannot recommend too highly. It tells the contrasting stories of two American bands, The Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, once good friends, then increasingly bitter enemies as the stock of the former rose while the latter continued to languish in obscurity.

The director, Ondi Timoner, spent seven years following both groups, and at times her movie, laconically narrated by Courtney Taylor, lead singer with the Dandies, is as funny and preposterous as anything in that great spoof rockumentary This is Spinal Tap. There are drug busts and screaming temper tantrums, doomed tours and the clash of monstrous egos. But this warts-and-all documentary is also desperately sad. For there is no doubt that Newcombe is some kind of twisted genius whose own troubled and abrasive personality has constantly undermined the success his talent deserves. Wildly temperamental, often vile-tempered and for periods of the movie a scuzzy heroin addict, he makes wonderful music inspired by the heady days of the summer of love, the Stones in their glory days, the British shoe-gazing scene and his own personal obsessions.

It is, as one unusually perceptive A&R man observes in the film, music that seems simultaneously to look backwards into the past and forwards into the future, and once you’ve got the taste for it you begin to crave it. Drenched in guitars, with wasted vocals, haunting melodies, Eastern drones and a sense of spaced-out adventure, the music of the Brian Jonestown Massacre appeals to me in a way no other rock band has since the Smiths.

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