The Dandy Warhols are has-beens. Shot into the public eye when their single Bohemian Like You was used to soundtrack the launch of Vodafone’s mobile telephone brand worldwide, the band, from Portland, Oregon, became an overnight success after six years scrabbling for recognition. It didn’t last. They quickly signed a lucrative deal with a major label, but the lo-fi albums which followed weren’t what the public wanted. The Dandy Warhols were swiftly written off by the press and forgotten.
When I meet Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the band’s lead singer, in his freezing cold dressing room he tells me, “All the big commercial bazillion dollar music sites and press were just like ‘Those stoners, they f***ing suck! They could’ve been huge and they’ve f***ed it up getting stoned and name-checking their friends.’” But they didn’t f*** up. After 16 years performing together the band have just made the defining album of their career, Earth to the Dandy Warhols, and they are touring harder than ever. It shows on Taylor-Taylor’s face. His hair is cut short on one side, on the other side it straggles over his pierced ear. He wears a striped t-shirt and jeans which take ‘hobo chic’ to the extreme. He looks older than I thought he would, and in need of ten hours sleep. I immediately fancy him. This is because to be sitting in a room with Courtney Taylor-Taylor is to be basking in an aura of some kind of indefinable coolness.
He speaks in an American drawl that’s so slow I can’t quite tell whether he is pausing or has stopped talking altogether. We begin with the subject of the band’s recent creation of their own label, Beat The World Records. The Dandy Warhols were previously signed to Capitol Records and struggling with the company’s “man-child president” who assigned an A and R man insistent on producing the bands 2003 album Welcome To The Monkey House. The result was a slick, pop album which sits uncomfortably amongst the rest of their excellent but over-looked lo-fi back catalogue. Taylor-Taylor explains that the band were furious with the results of the commercial production; “It just about ruined us, you can just see our record sales dive a slow, slow nose dive.” He laughs as he tells me this, but there is still an underlying resentment. “We told Capitol ‘We’re not going to make another record, you’re just killing us.’ But we can’t not make music, that would be like saying ‘I’m not gonna drink beer, I’m not gonna party, I’m not gonna have any fun and f*** you.’” After bad-mouthing Capitol to any journalist who would listen they finally freed themselves from the company and Taylor-Taylor admits, “We were as prepared as any group of nine year olds possibly can be.” The resulting album, Odditorium Or Warlords Of Mars, is a firmly un-commercial collection of strange, experimental songs that the singer is proud of. “We made the most amazing record of our career,” he smiles. “It was like the triple f***ing slam dunk right before the electricity goes out.”
The album was badly received by the press and the public, and then came Dig! a film which followed The Dandy Warhols and peers The Brian Jonestown Massacre just as they were on the brink of success. Director Ondi Timoner portrays the two bands as best friends torn apart by The Dandy Warhols overnight success with the single Bohemian Like You. I’m scared of asking about the film in case Taylor-Taylor clams up, and, initially, he does. “You know it really wasn’t actually much of a documentary. We did a lot of acting and a lot of set ups. I get asked questions and for a couple of years I tried to answer them and I ended up just making a f***ing idiot out of myself.” I ask tentatively if he still keeps in touch with Anton Newcombe, the eccentric lead singer and guitarist with The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The tension that has built up in the dressing room is somehow broken by this question and Taylor-Taylor begins to talk easily about his friend who is portrayed in Dig! as a violent egocentric. “I’ve never seen Anton get in a fight and I’ve known him for 15 years. The only thing weird between us is the f***ing movie and the press that came after it and the realisation of the mistake we had made. It really put a wedge between us,” he says. The film took its toll on both bands, the result ultimately being that both Taylor-Taylor and Newcombe became “Like pretty serious alcoholics during the last several years. Anton was not necessarily a happy drunk, he was an angry-pissed-off-at-everything-drunk. But he’s a happy drunk now, though we’ll see...”
He goes on to talk at length about Newcombe’s latest album and somehow we end up chatting for a very long time about pretty much everything. He talks about the 1930’s film star Marlene Deitrich who is “like the Humphrey Bogart of chicks,” and his obsession with the cycle of repetition in music from the 1500s which has seeped into his own records - “I mean Bohemian Like You is just constant repetition but the harmonies wander and come back. It’s like basically taking a rubber band and just stretching it one way and then another and then another…” He discusses alcohol and the brain chemistry researcher who told him about that every year scientists discover “good” things which alcohol does for the brain despite the fact that “It screws your liver and “you’ll look like f***ing Keith Richards, like a shrivelled apple.” He confides that with a hangover he looks “like Bill Clinton. I have a puffy, pie- face.” He talks about science fiction writers and his home, a recreation of a 400 year old French farmhouse. In short, he isn’t, unlike most artists, ceaselessly promoting the band’s tour and album. He is talking instead about the things he and The Dandy Warhols are interested in and trying to get you interested in them too.
This is what endears me to Courtney Taylor-Taylor, who doesn’t seem to have been scarred by his experiences with the fickle media who have in turns adored and berated The Dandy Warhols. He speaks to me at length and he’s relaxed. There is no A and R man to call time on our interview and I get the feeling that if I hadn’t had to leave he would have happily spoken to me until he was due on stage. As we part he tells me that at the moment he enjoys listening to the band’s musical peers, Blitzen Trapper; “I think it’s my favourite record in the world, aside from my own record.” This statement isn’t made with arrogance but with self-assurance. The Dandy Warhols are immensely proud of their music because that’s all they care about. Media training and the press’ perception mean nothing to them. “We never thought of that when we were kids,” he says. “We thought about chord changes and guitar sounds and what kinds of words and melodies pull our heart strings, and that’s about all we do.” It’s more than enough.
