The Humans Are Dead

Anton Newcombe – the legendary frontman of one of rock music's most interesting outfits of recent years – is in an unexpectedly jovial mood as he answers the phone from Germany. It's early in the morning in Berlin, but still, he's surprisingly with it and ready to rant.

“I read an article in The Economist,” he starts, explaining what the title of the new album, Aufheben, is all about and already contradicting the image of the drug-addled vagabond he's often laughably portrayed as. “It talked about this German word that meant to destroy something in order to revere it and rebuild it. Germany has this word, because of their history over the last hundred years, so they have had to destroy their history and culture in order to build it back up again.

“I wanted this idea like you know how they sent out this record into space and it has all this music on it, like The Beatles and all this music that's for the aliens to find or whoever – well I like the idea of just sending out a plaque with the pictures of the humans on it (he's referring to the cover of Aufheben – a Carl Sagan diagram from The Voyager program), and it just says this one word, to let them know that in order to understand or preserve the human race, they're gonna have to destroy it first.”

Trying to coerce aliens into destroying the human race – that's more like it!

The album itself is one of the strongest of BJM's career, built from the ground up around solid drum beats and heavy bass lines that Newcombe says were just the result of him fucking around in the studio, not really knowing where to start.

“Wow, that's so amazing that you came to that from listening to it, because that's absolutely how it came together. I don't go into a studio with ideas ready to record, I just get in there and see what happens. So we'd been in the studio for three days and there were all these people who were in there with me and I had nothing. I was coming up with nothing. So then I was like, you know, I just got on the drums, and I would watch YouTube videos and I would like try to de-construct what the drummers were doing and just try to play the drumbeat myself, and then it would all fall apart but we'd have some part of a song and I would just build it up from there.”

He sounds confused when trying to recall specifics from the album sessions, and when asked whether Will Carruthers from Spacemen 3 played bass on the whole record he kind of trails off.

“Yeah he played some bass... I think... on some of the tracks, but you know I just need to be around people when I'm making music, because the music doesn't come from within me. You know? I just pull it out of the air or something so whether that's my friends or some guy from Iceland or whatever, you know, I need those people around for the music to come out or it just doesn't happen.”

Over the last few albums, and particularly on 2010's Who Killed Sgt Pepper? EP, Newcombe has dabbled in adding some electronic elements to the band's sound. Let's get a few things straight about where he stands on this kind of thing: he hates German electronic music, saying it's all stupid house and techno, but he does like some of the trippier elements of dubstep and in particular rates the work of Burial very highly.

“I don't have this feeling where I want to make or I enjoy electronic drum music, you know like UNKLE – those expert remix DJs or whatever. Man, like I fucking do not understand it. Also like you know those DJs, someone sent me a photo or tweeted a photo of this guy with his laptop open and it said like 'DJ A-Trak' or someone 'just played a killer set!' (laughs) I was, like, you know, if you stole their laptop and you could learn how to press play on his iTunes then you could play a killer set as well. It's like fucking Madonna man, you know, she goes to Europe and she goes to Denmark and she gets the best guy in Denmark to make her a song and she gets the best DJ from someone else to make her a song and then she just sings on them and then somehow they're her songs. But that's her power, and you know what, we're talking about her right now. Even that DJ AM, you know, he died recently, and he just got Mixmaster Mike or someone to make all this cool shit for him and he would just replay it on a computer, you know? Fuck that guy.”

Okay then, shit's getting a bit real. Let's try a different tack and concentrate on why Newcombe has managed to keep a band together after all these years, when bands that emerged from the same 'scene' like the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club had massive peaks before disappearing into relative obscurity.

“That's been a very clear agenda from me from the beginning,” he says with renewed focus. “I didn't want to make music that could be used on the television or the radio to sell tampons or toothpaste or whatever. There was never any danger of my music having that appeal, and that's why I think it's still going. You know like The Stone Roses or my friend Steve Kilbey from the church, because he had this flash in the pan success it's like he's doomed to never be taken seriously again. It doesn't matter how good his music is, it's like because of this one-time success, no one looks at it the same way. I never went out and said, 'I'm gonna go in and make this kind of record.' Like, 'I'm gonna put on a leather jacket and make this kind of music.' And heaps of people do it that way, and have always done it that way. Like The Beatles, you know, they were like, 'We're gonna take Chuck Berry and... I don't know, oh, Elvis, and we're gonna be that band today.' And it worked for them. But I never know what I'm gonna do before I do it or how it's gonna sound before I make it.

“Plus there's this thing with my music that it can be taken in so many different ways. Like it's a rock band, or a psychedelic band, or a folk band or an art project or something. It can slot into so many different places that I never had to worry about it appealing to any massive audience.”