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Thursday 16 October 2008

Tortured genius

Charles Spencer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre

Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she did.

After spending long days looking at great art and great architecture, you might have thought the spirit would crave the most beautiful classical music in the evening. Indeed I took along some favourite CDs of Haydn and Mozart for just such an eventuality. But I found that in my few brief periods of time off for good behaviour on the fresco trail, I wanted nothing more than to listen to the Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Regular readers may remember that I mentioned the band last month following their appearance at Guilfest when the band’s notoriously temperamental leader, Anton Newcombe, accused the laid-back Surrey audience of being one of the most boring he’d ever played to, and turned his back on them for most of the set. As I have since discovered this was impeccable manners by his lights. In his time he’s been arrested and banged up for three days for kicking a member of the audience viciously in the head, while walkouts and on-stage fights between band members have regularly enlivened their sets. More than three dozen musicians have passed through the ranks since the group’s formation in the early Nineties, with Newcombe the only continuous presence, though his delightfully goofy, heroically good-natured tambourine player, Joel Gion, has been along for most of the turbulent ride.

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