Class A Act
Sydney Morning Herald(Australia)
by Matt Frilingos
July 25, 2003

Thanks to the scurrilous British press, Zia McCabe will not be taking her top off during the Dandy Warhols' current tour. In the band's early days, McCabe, playing keyboards onstage, would often be overcome with a sudden urge to remove her T-shirt - an urge she made no attempt to combat.

"The British press kind of wrecked it," she says from her hometown of Portland. "They made it like such a big deal. Like it was this schtick I came up with and they were trying to work out if I was like a voyeurist or a feminist or an exhibitionist. I was just having fun. It was like when I used to go see Green Day or the Cramps, I'd sometimes take my top off and jump around in the mosh pit. "But then it wasn't fun anymore, because it wasn't spontaneous. I'd start thinking about what everyone is expecting and who's looking. You can thank the British press for f---ing it up for everybody." The band has discovered that continuing to act as a bunch of freewheeling hippies while in the public eye comes with some unwanted side effects. To McCabe's chagrin, when the British press overcame its fascination with her breasts, its next obsession was the band's drug habits.

"As a band, we're pretty honest," she says. "We don't care if people know we experimented with drugs, so we love telling stories about our experiences - but they blow it out of proportion.

"They started inhibiting what we were expressing. But they got bored of it on their own. We weathered the storm and kept being ourselves." The band describe themselves as hippies, but they are not ashamed to admit to having banked large cheques for licensing their songs for use in ads by companies including Nike and Vodafone. In Australia, their recent single, We Used to Be Friends, came with a sticker which read: "As Heard on the Holden Astra TV Ad."

"Do we see ourselves as sell-outs?" says McCabe. "I wouldn't feel comfortable using our music for Exxon Valdez or for prescription drug companies. But if it's cell phones or tampons or curling irons, it doesn't bother me. It's a really good way to get our music out there.

"Actually, I can't believe no sleeping pill companies have asked us to use [last album's] Sleep - with the lyric "If I could sleep forever" - for one of their commercials. Maybe it sounds like someone would want to OD on their pills."

Besides, says McCabe, the band's namesake, Andy Warhol, was "fully commercial. He didn't mind at all. I don't know why people have such a problem with it. I understand if they don't want to be part of the corporate world, but really, in today's world it's inevitable.

"At a certain level all the corporations are f---ed, and Vodafone probably doesn't do enough recycling or whatever, but it's not in trouble for doing horrible things."

If the band want to spruik for advertising offers for songs from their new album, Welcome to the Monkey House, they might consider targeting leg warmer and shoulder-pad makers. The album's credits list sounds like a Who's Who of early '80s pop: writing and co- production by Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes, backing vocals by Duran Duran's singer Simon Le Bon and rhythm guitar by Chic's Nile Rodgers.

Still, McCabe claims, the band did not set out to produce a revamped relic of the '80s.

"It didn't seem like that's what we were going for when we started," she says. "We wanted to make the low end sound like Dr Dre and make the rest stand on its own without a wall of sound. But we ended up with a lot of keyboards in the low end, which means it ends up getting called '80s.

"Courtney [Taylor-Taylor, the band's vocalist and songwriter] realised everyone was doing a Gary Numan type thing and trying to sound like Eurotrash and he realised there was this whole Nick Rhodes and Planet Earth keyboards sound we could go for - and if we were going to do it it was better to go to the source."

McCabe says the band was happy to seek counsel from Nick Rhodes on his pioneering contributions to glam rock, but they have no intention of borrowing from his wardrobe and make-up cabinet. "We like to check out different styles, but we always come back to being scumbags. We prefer to have dirt under our fingernails and clothes with holes. We're actually just a bunch of hippies that play dress-up."