Live review: The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Wedgewood Rooms, 28th June 2008

“Keep it futile, subjects!” Anton Newcombe is angry, and justifiably so. This evening’s audience contains the sadly inevitable hard core of idiots who’ve only come to see The Brian Jonestown Massacre in the hope of winding him up with backchat and the occasional projectile – and, to his credit, he doesn’t give them what they want.

“Yeah, you got some nice opinions, man, nice opinions,” he sneers, refusing to storm off. The show must go on.

This pre-Glastonbury warm-up show didn’t start too badly at all, neanderthals notwithstanding. Newcombe even made an early appearance on stage shortly after the support band, seemingly trying to procure some, er, hospitality services for his drummer. I don’t think he was being entirely serious … though with Newcombe you never can tell for certain.

His start-of-set enthusiasm seemed unfeigned, though, as he praised the sunny weather and Portsmouth’s faded merits as a seaside resort before kicking off a lengthy performance of sprawling hazy Californian psychedelia. The Brian Jonestown Massacre make music that is deceptively simple, ragged and fuzzy like your grandmother’s fireside rug or your ex-hippie uncle’s cashmere coat, rich with sun-bleached colours and the smells of forests and beaches.

Good music should transport you, should take you elsewhere; and, for my money, The Brian Jonestown Massacre recreate the vibe of the sixties more eloquently than the actual bands of the era. When I listen to them play, I’m riding the coast-hugging highway on a motorbike with Hunter S Thompson, or laid out brain-blasted in a Berkeley squat with Kesey and the Pranksters … of course, I wasn’t even alive in the sixties, let alone in California. But Anton’s movie is the one in which I want to have a walk-on part, as if it’s a hyper-real cyberspace simulation; it sounds like how I want to imagine the sixties might have been. And our desires can be more more powerful than reality.

The mellow richness of The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s music can be at least partly attributed to the arsenal of vintage instruments and stomp boxes they use to make it. The guitars are almost exclusively time-worn Vox semiacoustics, and the bass is an original Gibson Thunderbird running through an old Fender Bassman head; this is classic gear nostalgia raised to the point of fetish, but it pays off with the incredible tonal depth of the music. No digital crunch here, folks - this is all analogue, all the way.

The sonic maelstrom is mirrored by the restrained chaos on-stage. With three guitarists (including Anton himself), a drummer, a bass player and a guy on keys, there’s not much space for craziness or communication, the latter being accomplished by nods and head jerks, or brief head-to-head conferences in the breaks between songs while Newcombe disappears backstage for a cigarette.

The man himself may be the songwriting focus of the band, but he’s not fond of the limelight, spending the whole show stood sideways, scrunched up next to the speaker stack except for occasional forays toward centre-stage during the more wiggy moments of the set. Meanwhile the visual focus of the band is held by Joel Gion, a gentleman who plays a mean tambourine and looks like a cheerfully out refugee from a version of the Blue Oyster Bar where they wear sixties denim instead of leather.

For reasons that are easy to understand, The Brian Jonestown Massacre stick to their more conventional material in a live setting. As gloriously odd and enveloping as the effect-drenched album tracks may be to listen to on your headphones at home, it’s not the sort of stuff that keeps a live audience fixated. However, all it takes to achieve that captivity is four jangling chords and a solid backbeat, amped up to the max and improvised upon as the songs stretch out like warm toffee on a summer’s day. It’s an almost impressionist approach to songwriting; you don’t come for the details, you come for the tonal colours, for the palette of sounds the band use for their bold brushstrokes.

Eventually the stupid lobby in the audience - frustrated by Anton’s failure to fulfil their fantasies of schoolyard superiority - decide that the time has come to fall back on the time-honoured tool of concert-going morons everywhere: the thrown object. This age of all-plastic drinks containers make this a much less dangerous stunt than before, but it’s no less insulting or childish. Newcombe’s otherwise well-restrained temper boils over a few songs before the end of the set; when he starts talking fast, it can be hard to make out exactly what he’s saying to the jeering monkey-men in the crowd, but a few choice sentences leap out clearly, dripping with sarcasm. He ends his little rant with something along the lines of “well, guess what - I live in a nice big house, you live in a council flat.” PWNED, as the kids say.

There is significant applause, and the band start up again to finish off a loud rambling set that nears ninety minutes in length. You can’t say The Brian Jonestown Massacre don’t offer great value for money; just make sure you go and see them for the sake of the music, and ignore the media mythology.

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