Despite their early ambitions to re-energise the shoegaze genre (which will make more sense after reading the below interview), The Dandy Warhols emerged from Portland, Oregon in the mid-1990s to become best-known for brandishing a unique take on alternative rock that favoured lengthy psychedelic compositions and instantly accessible pop tunes in equal measure. After hitting their stride commercially with …Dandy Warhols Come Down in 1997 and Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia in the early 2000s, the band were dropped by their label Capitol Records in 2005. Ties between band and label had been strained for some time, as evidenced in the infamous 2004 documentary DiG!, which chronicled the band’s career in parallel to The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Rather than despair, the band made the most of their freedom by establishing their own label, Beat The World, which they now use to promote their friends’ bands, in addition to their own material. 2008’s Earth To The Dandy Warhols was their debut LP as an independent band, and they’ve recently released a greatest hits compilation entitled The Capitol Years: 1997-2005.
Ahead of their Australian tour as part of the Parklife Festival, my girlfriend Rachael and I met with The Dandy Warhols in Portland on September 9 2010, after winning a competition organised by Virgin Mobile, Pedestrian.TV and Parklife Festival promoters Fuzzy. After watching them record a rare acoustic set for the local community radio station OPB – wherein they covered songs by Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, as well as a couple of their own – we decamped to their studio space, The Odditorium, for an extended interview during which the four members come and go. Footage of our trip embedded below.

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You guys are based here in Portland. What do you love about the city, and what do you hate?

Zia: Do you want to say one thing you love and one thing you hate, Peter?

Pete: I like Powell's.

What's that?

Pete: Powell's is our bookstore. It's amazing. It's a really cool, big place.

Brent: The country's largest bookstore.

Pete: And they put new and used and kind of collectible books all together. We're all kinda big readers.

Sweet. We saw the massive bookshelves in the other room.

Brent: And there's the largest city park in the country, the smallest city park in the country.

Zia: That's what you love about it?

Brent: I just listed off some really cool things about it, yeah. There's not –

Pete: That's not the question!

Brent: I love Forest Park, there's 60 miles of trails and it's really fun. What do I hate? God, I don’t know. It seems like all the roads are under construction all the time.

Zia: Yeah, but you're going to love when they're all nice when it's done.

Brent: It’s never finished.

Zia: What do I love? I love the bridge. I can't think of what I hate.

Brent: I like all the food. The food carts and the restaurants.

Pete: I love Stumptown Coffee.

There's a lot of love here. We’re not hearing much hate.

Zia:  ‘Cause we live in Portland!

Brent: It's kind of like a Rotterdam or something when it comes to bicycles.

Zia: Yeah, I guess I'm the bike rider of the band. You love the bikes, commute as much on them.

Brent: When I lived in South East, I rode.

Zia: You don't commute as much. The rush hour, I hate driving to Vancouver from Portland. It's got really bad congestion bottleneck over that bridge. If I feel hatred in this town, that's about the only time I feel it.

Are there any downsides to being based in Portland, as a band?

Pete: The only issue I ever have with Portland is that it is a little small town sometimes, and so if I've been here for more than four months I start going a little stir crazy. But luckily we go on tour often enough that that rarely happens. It's usually only when we're making a record. Then I have somewhere to channel that crazy energy.

Brent: It rains for six months straight everywhere, pretty much, just turns gray and just gets misty. We have what's called "Juneuary". June in the rest of the country is actually summer. We have Juneuary.

Zia: Frank Sinatra wasn't singing about Portland.

Brent: No, you're right. Frank Sinatra never did sing about Portland.

What's an average day for you?

Zia: My days have been so mental lately. I can't remember. What I would like an average day to be is get up at noon, come to rehearsal, maybe work on a track or two afterwards in the studio, play with Matilda [her daughter] the rest of the day, watch Weeds. That's not what really happens.

Brent: I don't have the same day twice. It's been getting more and more hectic.

Pete: The only thing consistent about my day is that I wake up and drink coffee. That's about it.

How often do you rehearse?

Brent: When we're all here in Portland together, we seem to get in about four or five rehearsals a week, for a couple of hours.

Zia: Which is about two weeks before a tour.

Brent: We'll do a couple of weeks of rehearsal here and then head out. That's kind of it.

Do you find you always start rehearsing with a particular song?

Zia: ‘Boys Better’ comes out pretty early on and I’m never ready to do that one. It hurts my arm!

Pete: ‘Boys Better’ is a good one to start for me and Courtney [Taylor-Taylor, singer/guitarist], just because it's loud, it's easy. It's the way of testing amps and stuff.

Zia: Just slowly sort of starts to funnel into a set list when it gets down to about three rehearsals left. We start trying to rehearse songs in order. Other than that, we just play around.

You four have playing together since 1998, after Eric [Hedford, their original drummer] left. How has your approach to making music evolved over that time?

Pete: We kinda know what we're doing now… [laughs] Which maybe isn't as much fun because we have more of a routine. I say that kind of as a joke, because there hasn't been anything routine about making a song yet. It doesn't seem like there's ever one way to do it.

Brent: They're all an entirely different challenge each time. There's no formula at all.

Zia: Right. It does feel a little more grown up now, though.

Brent: Speak for yourself.

How do you approach playing festivals differently to your own shows?

Pete: Well, they're usually shorter. Our own shows we'll play two hours or so. We used to play three and a half hours. But the festivals it seems like it's anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and 15 minutes so it always feels like it stops right when it starts.

Zia: Yeah, you stick to playing the hits, and then stick a few of the trippy jam ones in there but I think we feel more committed to busting out the hits for the big audiences. Which is fun.

What’s the strangest festival you’ve played at?

Zia: What about that one in Greece with those weird cow hides tanning over in that dustbowl

Pete: That was the weirdest festival.

Zia: The smell of rotting, drying, fleshy smell, and it was just dusty. It was awful. I don't remember the show.

Pete: They were tanning hides in the lot right next to where the festival was.

Zia: They probably got it for cheap.

Pete: During sound check we didn't know what the smell was so it wasn't that bad. When we found out it was like “Oh gross! Rotting meat!”

Zia: Was the show any good, was the crowd any good?

Pete: The strangest gig was, I think, Rome, when we got double booked with Joe Satriani.

What happened? Double booked? Let’s hear more about this. You and Satch played at the same time?

Pete: We were supposed to play at the same time. We ended up playing after him, which was not good.

Zia: I don't even remember that. I don't think I knew that was happening.

Pete: Probably not because the tour manager wanted to put his foot down and not play.

Brent: That's what we should've done.

Pete: Are you kidding? We actually had people come to see us.

Brent: Oh yeah, 17 of them down there.

Zia: They're diehard fans now!

Pete: Absolutely.

Brent: Joe Satriani, he's…What a nightmare.

Zia: Wait, but I've got a weird one. How about that gig supporting Scott Weiland - was that Argentina or Chile?

Pete: It wasn't Scott Weiland.

Zia: What's the other guy that’s just like that?

Pete: It's the dude from Soundgarden.

Chris Cornell.

Zia: Yeah. Okay, so we were supposed to be doing a festival. He's on the same bill like everyone cares. Really, we were just opening for him in a big hockey arena-type venue. We're out there with however many thousands of people fit in there and it's a good set; we're playing really good. It sounds good on stage. I start to wonder as I'm looking out at these people. I don't think these are ‘woos’, I'm pretty sure they're ‘boos’. I just start seeing the middle finger, and I started to do the math and about one out of every hundred people in the audience seemed to actually be looking around, nervous to admit that they were having a good time. It's just not a big crossover market between us and that guy. Since it sounded so good on stage, I don't think it really seemed to matter. It was still fun and it was just weird.

Pete: I beg to differ. I had a horrible time.

Zia: I thought it was really funny.

Pete: I really wanted to throw things at people and then I realised there were a lot more of them so I didn't.

Brent: It was just a terrible bill.

Zia: I didn't think it was their fault. It was the promoter's fault for putting us opening for people who don't like our music.

Pete: And Phoenix was on before us.

Zia: I don't know who that is.

Pete: The French band! Phoenix! They got the same reaction we did.

Zia: I'm not surprised.

Brent: And they're a really elegant, beautiful group.

Like yourselves.

Zia: Exactly!

Brent: Thank you very much.

Zia: They didn't fit. It was definitely for me one of the weirdest shows ever, just to get up there…

Pete: Are we really elegant?

Brent: No.

Zia: We have moments. No never, when we went on though, there was a time where they were still booing the group before us.

Zia: Oh yeah.

[Courtney enters]

That gig you were talking about, was that Chris Cornell solo?

Zia: Yeah. [To Courtney] They asked about the weirdest gig.

Courtney: Oh my God!

Zia: The tanning hides in Greece, and then getting boo'd by 99 out of 100% of the 30,000 people [at Chris Cornell]. But I had a good show though. To me, it sounded good up there. I had a good mix.

Pete: It was disappointing.

Zia: If it had been as shitty as the show before it, I would've left.

Courtney: The funniest part was when Phoenix got off stage. I was like "How'd it go?" They were like "They boo'd us." I was like, "No they didn't." They were like, [puts on French accent] "Yes they did, they were booing. They were sort of big angry football.". I was like "Oh. Okay. But I don't think they boo'd you. You guys sounded awesome." And then we went on and of course –

Zia: It's kind of hard to tell if it's a woo or a boo at first. It took me a minute to go "Wait a tick, is that a boo? Is that 20,000 boos?"

Courtney: There wasn't 20,000 people in that room.

Zia: However many, I have no idea what that room size was.

Courtney: God, that was funny.

Let’s talk about your independent label, Beat The World. What are your plans for the label and how much are you guys involved in the day-to-day business?

Courtney: Well, there just isn't much business. We get our friends' bands and we help them get their records made or whatever. Everyone just picks their bands that they want, or if we want to put our records out it on Beat The World, we can, or put them out on other labels.

Zia: I wanted the 1776, that I'm particularly involved in. I'm paying for them to get their stuff done and done right; basically, because they're teenagers. But most of our friends have played with bands and know how to record themselves. They can mix; they can come in and use our studio to mix. They can get their artwork together themselves and all that stuff. That's what we do is sort of facilitate other people. We help bands help themselves. That's kind of the thing. We're not business people, the four of us. We're kind of into music. It just really turned out to be it really is business. You have to be that kind of guy to get anywhere with it, to get anything to happen. What else?

You said that Beat The World is to help bands help themselves. Is that your main inspiration for the label?

Courtney: Definitely, all our friends have bands and they're not really sure what to do. We just decided let's make a record label. We have a lot of people – even if we're just simply showing their records to the thousands of people that are on our website that are fans of us, that's a start.

Zia: It's a way to keep this building in motion too.

Courtney: It's really fun here when there's stuff going on constantly in every room.

Zia: And it seems like such a waste when there's not.

Courtney: Totally.

Is it energising for your own stuff as well, to see all the people here creating?

Courtney: Absolutely.

Zia: Of course.

Courtney: That's the dream of – that was my dream since I was a little kid, just to have a place and filled with lots of bands and make videos, and do stuff. We coloured my comic book here, my graphic novel, coloured it here, and that was great because we've got film being made, music being made, and then a graphic novel here too. That was exciting. It's totally a twist. Then we got the big dinner parties going, then we'd have a couple of great local chefs in there cooking.

Virgin Mobile - Fly to the USA to interview The Dandy Warhols from PEDESTRIAN.TV on Vimeo.

How do you guys find music these days?

Courtney: How do you find music? I find it very amicable. [laughter] How do you find music? Turn left at Iceland, or whatever. I pretty much let my engineer Jake Portrait [find it for me]. He finds like “28 new tracks a day!”. I’ll be like, “This is kind of bullshit,” or “I can dig this.” He plays it for a second, "love it" and here's another one. "This is really cool. It's got a great keyboard thing." Get 30 seconds of that, "Okay, you know what, I have a feeling you won’t like it." You get the rundown and may stop on a couple of them.

Zia: It seems like in the last five years there's more new music that I've been into than the decade previous, that's for sure. But I tend to wait a couple of years until stuff has settled and see which ones are still really good. People say if they it's been out a couple of years and they still say I should get it, then I do. Right when it's new, it might not be –

Courtney: Yeah, people believe anything they're told twice, which is good if you're on the selling end of something. If your band blows and you're trying to sell your records, at least you can just get a snowball effect going.

Zia: Bloodhound Gang is the best example of that. The street team!

Courtney: Did they have a super effective street team?

Zia: They were based on street teams and stuff, not based on artistic merit.

Courtney: But they have some good cuts though.

Zia: Do they? I remember not – maybe they do. I was just going "How in the fuck are these guys successful?"

Brent: I thought they were like a funny band.

They're a bit of a novelty band. They played Soundwave in Australia last year. They did this stage trick where the guitarist chugs a pitcher of beer and then vomits it up and then drinks the vomit beer.

Brent: That's absurd!

Pete: Why are we even discussing this? Why are we wasting our interview time on them?

Courtney: So this band has their guitarist chug a pitcher of beer, vomit it back up into the pitcher, then chug it again. That was Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. Do you remember that at all? That was like the dude hanging by his scrotum with hooks through his – that kind of stuff. All that – there was a whole team of those guys and see, they should've sold records. They could've, apparently.

Brent: Imagine how good the Beatles' music would sound if they did that. [laughter]

Courtney: If Paul would've just vomited into Ringo's mouth. The Beatles could've sold way more records.

Brent: Where the hell was their street team? [laughter]

Who are some bands that deserve to have a major impact on the music scene but aren't getting the recognition?

Brent: Maybe the The Sixers.

Courtney: They have a new manager. They haven't put a record out yet.

Zia: But it's not like they shouldn't have it.

Courtney: They might still, but people that are out, that should be having a bigger effect –

Not necessarily here in Portland; nationally, internationally.

Courtney: Yeah, like any band in the world, anyone that you think is doing some really super important work.

Zia: Should be bigger than they are.

Pete: All our friends should be bigger than they are. [laughs]

Courtney: That's a hard question for me. I definitely feel like the world is a place where good and evil are equally balanced and people get what they deserve, and what they earn. The worst things that have ever happened to me, I can look back and go “that's because I was lazy. That was because I was sloppy, that was because I was sloppy and lazy. That's because I over-thought it.” So I don't know.

Like The Black Keys, they're huge, hugely influential and they should be. They're awesome. They stick to their guns, they do their thing. They're really good at it. They've developed it. They started out just being like a White Stripes imitation, right down to the name and everything. Turns out they're awesome. They just got better, and better, and more uniquely themselves.

I think the world is pretty fair and just to bands now, has been since about 2002, when the Internet kind of usurped the power of the old-school system of only major radio can make you an important band, only 58-year old men who've been doing it for so long they don't care anymore, it's just weird and random. That changed in the early 2000s and I think things have been pretty great since then. There's not many more bands that I care about or listen to or whatever. I still think nobody can touch Jimi Hendrix or the Stones. The internet has not produced bands that are as good as The Rolling Stones.

But, it's made it so that the Black Keys can sell more seats in Seattle than we can. That's great. They're amazing. The Killers, they were good. They got as big as they should've gotten. Jack White is hugely important and influential and he's amazing. He's fantastic. The Strokes: hugely influential, should be, they should be. They're the most important band that's happened in I don't know how long.

I just heard a country song, top-10 American country, the most backwater "Well, don't put anything in there that you can't buy at K-Mart," – it had Strokes-y guitar, total Albert Hammond Jr. guitar stylings in a country song. That means that that kid is the single most influential guitarist probably since Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix. For a guitar style to go all the way from just being the coolest of cool indie, then big hits, and then their second record didn't sell as good as their first, and they got poo-poo'd by the label and the third didn't sell as good – then they kind of fizzled. And we listened to eight years now of modern rock radio in America. If you have a Strokes-y guitar part in your song you will get on modern rock radio. Their influence has not gone away and now it's so broad that it's in a country hit. It's okay for country music to play guitar like Albert Hammond, Jr. That is amazing.

I just had this conversation with Albert Hammond Jr's dad and had to congratulate him on that. "You raised your kid, whatever you did, you did it right." What an amazing thing, and the other guitarist too, Nick Valensi is also super. The Strokes; they revolutionised guitar.

Did you enjoy putting together The Capitol Years? [their recently-released greatest hits compilation, comprising their time on Capitol between 1995 and 2007]

Courtney: It was just singles, really, so it wasn't really like a big wonderful sit around, hug and high-five or anything. Pete was the first to listen to them in order. He said “sounds good in this order”. I would've just swapped ‘Scientist’ and ‘The Last High’, the order of that. So load in your iPod, swap so that it goes ‘Used To Be Friends’, ‘Last High’, then ‘Scientist’, and then ‘Plan A’. Do that, it makes a lot of sense.

Tell us about your new single, ‘This Is The Tide’. How did that song come to be?



The Dandy Warhols - 'This Is The Tide'

Courtney:  came into the studio one day and it was about half done and I was like "What the hell is that?" And Brent goes, "Oh man, that's our new song." "Awesome!" "Yeah, about a year ago when we were in Australia you came into the hotel room and I was playing that riff on the acoustic guitar and you go, "Wow, what the hell's that? And I said nothing, and you said we should make that our new song." [laughter] The best part is I only had to work about an hour and 45 minutes on it.

That's pretty precise.

Courtney: Yeah, usually they're like 40 days, and I'm still in there going "Oh no, could you listen to this, is this better than this one?" Yeah, I just let them do it. It was great.

Do you see that happening more often in the future?

Courtney: I sure do!

One of my favourite Courtney quotes in Dig! is where you claimed to be the most well-adjusted band in America, because your parents are still together. Do you still stand by that?

Pete: That’s not true anymore.

Courtney: No, probably about a year later Zia's parents split up.

Oh, shit.

Courtney: Yeah. But I think we are as well-adjusted as you could probably possibly be and still have a need to get things out of you artistically. They say a happy man doesn't write his memoirs. That's pretty true. Saying that we're the most well-adjusted band in America doesn't mean we're particularly well-adjusted. It just means that every other band is more badly adjusted, and that was pretty true. It's such a great quote. It sounds so funny.

Who else would claim that? No one claims that.

Courtney: No one would bother. When we played Arkansas, with a totally straight face these cats that I met and hung out with the next day in Lt. Rock were like "We've got to go get pizza…, it's the best pizza in Arkansas." Deadpan. Okay, as we were walking there we ran into a bunch of their friends. I smiled at their friends, walked up to the café they were sitting at and they were like "Wow, what are you doing here?" I was like "Oh, we're coming to get the best pizza in Arkansas," and they just with blank, bone-dry "Oh, Damn Good Pies? Yeah that is the best pizza in Arkansas." Cool, great. I think that's very similar to the most well-adjusted band in America. [laughter]

It's the little things.

Courtney: What the hell does that mean, "best pizza in Arkansas"? What does that mean "the most well-adjusted band in America"? What does that actually mean?

Do you guys come from musical families?

Courtney: No.

Pete: No.

Courtney: Only Fathead [Brent] does. His dad was in one of those acoustic four-part mobile harmonies: white Levis, tan, pointed cowboy boots, matching sweater vests, playing folk and new hits, like The Doors. They would do a four-part version of ‘Light My Fire’, or whatever. After they graduated from college they played for their passage on the Queen Mary to England because they were going to go to Liverpool, where the Beatles were from of course. They loved the Beatles. They went to Liverpool, pooled their money, and bought a convertible Carmengia and two guys would sleep while the other two would walk around Liverpool in the rain, letting the other two guys sleep. Then they'd swap, and that's how they lived. They tried to get gigs and they couldn't get any, and they went "How did the Beatles make it from here? This is no music scene. There's nothing happening here." I don't know how long they were there and they ran out of money and came back. But they tried. They sold everything they owned and moved to Liverpool to make it and didn't quite do it.

There's two Brent stories that he's missed out on.

Courtney: Oh, I'll give you another one. I'll give you another Brent story. The other one was [sings] "Give me the beat boys and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll" - that song. He thought it was, "Give me the Beach Boys to free my soul," which was his favourite band. I don't know, he was like four, or something. Every night they'd hear this thumping on the wall and go in there and he would have the radio and wait for that song to come on. It would come on and he would get on his hands and knees, with his head right near the wall, and just go "bump, bump," and just hit his head against the wall on the down beat to this song. That was just amazing for him. He loved it because it was a song about his favourite band and this is how he expressed that excitement and enthusiasm for it, was by pounding his head against the wall. They thought there was something wrong with him of course but it was really that he just loved the Beach Boys.

When the band first started out, you were known for re-energising the sixties psychedelic genre.

Courtney: I thought we were known for re-energising the shoegazer genre, which had only ended like two years earlier.

Pete: I think it was still going on in places.

Courtney: Right. Slowdive, Jesus & Mary Chain; the shoegazer stuff. We were pretty much – it'd kind of ended and been replaced by more pop, which of course was Britpop, and even that was sort of not working out so well. Even in England, it was all about to go away and be replaced by the Spice Girls.

Pete: And Oasis.

Courtney: And Blur, and all that. But the 60s? I guess. We did get called the Velvet Underground.

Pete: I wonder why; ‘Lou Weed’… [laughs]

Courtney: Oh, right. Yeah we got called the Velvet Underground rip-off which was pretty awesome. Had we just been a little cooler it might have been true.

Pete: And had a viola.

Courtney: Yeah, then later we got called the Stones rip-off, it was really awesome but we weren't really good enough to actually be a Stones rip-off either.

Was it ever a goal of yours to re-energise a genre?

Courtney: The shoegaze thing, definitely. For me, definitely, I really thought “that's the best sound ever!”. I couldn't believe how great the sound of those bands – My Bloody Valentine. I mean, come on, that was the best sound. I couldn't believe it went away, and America never really noticed because we're fuckin’ idiots. I really was all about that. Eighties as well, I particularly set out with [Welcome To The] Monkey House and that whole recording, particularly to set out to make – what did I say? I said a cross between Duran Duran and Sade. That was what I really wanted to do. Then of course we got poo-poo'd for doing that in the heyday of sixties revival rock. That was when Jet and The Strokes and The White Stripes were huge, is when we made Monkey House, so we got poo-poo'd. Then a couple years – a year and a half later it was The Bravery, and The Killers, and all these great bands that were using synths and stuff.

I think the only band that was doing the eighties anymore was The Faint. They were great, but it was just a refreshing sound after all the vintage guitarness we've been living in, in our world, for ever, years and years. Then all these other bands started doing that and they got huge. We never got super huge until after The Strokes and the White Stripes got big. Then Thirteen Tales [From Urban Bohemia] was re-released, then it got big. I guess that's part of being from an out of the way town, is that we come home, and it's not particularly competitive. You don't think about having hits or the old-school industry was going to think about what we did. We just wanted to make cool records, surprise our friends with how awesome they were.

That's kind of the only reason we ever did anything. The genre thing was simply a tool that you can use to try to get yourself off, like “oh man, these records sound so cool”. We could avoid all the stupid shit from the eighties and just use all the cool stuff, make our own record. What are we going to do next?

Pete: I don’t know.

Do you think you're still stuck with the same genres or have you progressed throughout your albums?

Courtney: We were just noticing that our last record… I think our last record [Earth To The Dandy Warhols], is our most perfect record. But it's also the first record where we didn't really progress. We made new songs of the same types. Songs are songs. Let me get that straight.

Pete: Produced songs.

Courtney: Produced – produced is when you decide to use a synthesiser here instead of a mandolin. That's producing. When you decide to use all synthesisers instead of mandolins, guitars, or organic instruments, then you’re really producing. You're clearly making a very specific genre of music. If you use only stringed instruments and no backbeat, now you're making another very specific genre of folk music or whatever. That's producing, that's not songwriting. Songs are songs. They come from an individual. They feel like something and you don't need any instruments. You can just sing them out loud to yourself, and that's a song.

When you start putting things around it, that's producing. So those are production decisions. So don't believe journalists because they like to put things in categories and say “this is this” and “this is real” and “this is phony”. Every song is real. The production can be phony. If you're just like "We want to be like The Killers because they're big," then you're imitating something because of its success, not because of how emotionally it services the song that you're producing right now. Those are production decisions and those are decisions.

You can't say someone's “honest”, “a real honest producer”. It's all fucking decisions. Songwriting is honest. Producing is decisions. That's science. I wish we had another genre to unearth that nobody's unearthed yet.

Pete: Or that hasn't been unearthed lately.

Courtney: Yeah, but that's the other thing about the internet. Everybody's got access to everything. Everything is a big niche. You want D&D rock, Viking rock, or whatever, you can find it.

Sounds awesome. What would you like to be remembered for, musically?

Courtney: Viking rock.

Well hell, there's the next Dandy Warhols direction!

Courtney: The ultimate Viking rock song is [sings] “AhhhhhhhhAHHHHHHHHHH-AHH!” [‘Immigrant Song’]

Of course.

Courtney: “We come from the land of the ice and snow.” That's the ultimate Viking rock song. It's really not Cookie Monster vocals, not that kind of metal. Viking rock. I would like a Viking rock record.

Pete: Okay, calm down. It’s all about guitars.

Courtney: Yeah, Pete'll do it.

Pete: Yeah!

Courtney: Oh! My band for my graphic novel is an industrial band. Late seventies, early eighties-style industrial electronic. That's something nobody's unearthed for quite a long time. Nobody's done it and it's cool. It's exciting to work in a medium that is not crowded. It's exciting to own another neighbourhood where you can have a lot of acreage to work with.

Tomorrow night you're playing a gig at a fashion show in L.A. How much consideration have you given to your image throughout your career?

Courtney: It comes and goes.

Pete: It's more just a personal thing, like what feels good, how much you feel you can get away with on a certain day. It took me a couple weeks to work up to leather pants. I bought a pair and then couldn't just put them on and go out. Things like that.

Courtney: And then the first time Fathead came over to Pete's house, he was gardening in them.

Pete: No, it was just the boots.

Courtney: Really?

Pete: Nah, the story keeps getting bigger and bigger. [laughter]

Courtney: "He had a Mohawk and no pants, bunny slippers. Gardening."

Any regretful image decisions over the years?

Courtney: Yeah, tons.

Pete: In the band, or out of the band?

As a band, your style, your image.

Pete: In the band, not really.

Courtney: No, I have no style regrets as far as the band. There's a bunch of other regrets.

Pete: Pre-band, in high school there's a lot.

Courtney: In the band, there's business decisions and things like that I have regrets about. People we've worked with that we shouldn't have. We got involved with sneaky people. Fuckers! But fortunately time and great art smooths. It makes everything clear. Hindsight is 20/20, which is great. You can outlast the sneaky fuckers. Remember that. When people are fucking you over, you've allowed it to happen. You can see it, admit it to yourself where you went wrong, learn from it. Don't make the mistake again, and don't forget. Just out last the sneaky fuckers.

Pete: Are you joining us, Fathead?

We asked about ‘This Is The Tide’, and how that came to be.

Brent: Ten years ago Courtney and I lived in the Rock Dorm, which is right up the street.

Courtney: It was ten years ago?!

Brent: We probably moved out of there what – seven years ago.

Courtney: I thought it was in a hotel in Canberra.

Brent: I might have been but I first riffed it out in the Rock Dorm on the four-track.

Courtney: Tell them that. [laughter]

Brent: I had a little Tascam four-track recorder. I had a studio set up in the Rock Dorm where I had a microphone hanging from its cord over the chandelier like this, and I'd have another one that I just set on the table. I'd make recordings on it and then run a guitar into an amp and put it sort of nearby and it would pick up everything. Pretty much every night after going out, I’d go and make up some riff.

A year or two ago I had this grocery bag of cassettes out of all those tunes and that one came on. It was like “whoa, that's a pretty bitchin’ riff”. Then the greatest hits bonus track, there was a few things that we were noodling around on but Zia and I were having a really difficult time putting vocals on stuff and trying to come up with some stuff to sing, and we were coming down to a few days left to the deadline. I said "We better just start from scratch with a song that starts and has at least a vocal melody and most of the lyrics because this isn't really going anywhere."

Jeremy [Wheatley, band producer, programmer and mixer], and I just started a new track and riffed it out and that was it. But yeah, it's like a 10-year old song and it's like – at the time, whoever was playing live at the time probably got me going on it but I think in my mind I was doing some big arena rock epic.

Courtney mentioned he only spent an hour and 45 minutes on the track, so he's looking forward to you guys writing more and doing your own stuff.

Brent: Yeah, I've got a few up my sleeve.

Last question, you're going to be in Australia soon for Parklife. You've toured in Australia a few times now so what are you looking forward to most?

Brent: I think it's always nice in Australia. The weather, the fun people. Australia always has a lot of fun people to meet. The Mayor of Australia, Wally Kempton, of The Meanies and Even. We'll probably have a barbeque over at Wally's. I always look forward to that. We always call it Wally's barbeque even though he doesn't actually do the cooking. [laughter] He doesn't have anything to do with it except that he's there.

You live in Australia now, right?

Brent: Yeah, I live in Melbourne so it'll be really nice to get home. The food; the really strange fusion cuisine in Australia is delicious. Brunswick Street is fun. I can't wait to maybe go see a show at The Tote, go have a drink at Old Bar, hang out with Bob and Gamma from my Aussie band, Immigrant Union. We’re a country and western band. We might be playing Tamworth.

Brent: Pete went a whole tour of Australia one time only eating sashimi.

Pete: Two weeks.

Two weeks? As in breakfast, lunch, dinner.

Pete: I only ate one meal a day! [laughs]

Was it lunch?

Pete: Probably closer to dinner. I ate other things too, but I can't talk about those. [laughter]

Andrew McMillen

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The Dandy Warhols are in Australia to play the Parklife 2010 festival. Dates below:

Sept 25 - Parklife Festival - Brisbane QLD
Sep 26 - Parklife Festival - Perth, WA
Sep 30 - Wrest Point Entertainment Centre, Hobart - TAS
Oct 2 - Parklife Festival - Melbourne, VIC
Oct 3 - Parklife Festival - Sydney NSW
Oct 4 - Adelaide, South Aust, AUSTRALIAMore at: fuzzy.com.au

www.dandywarhols.com