Canada just dandy for the Warhols
The Globe And Mail
by Lee-Anne Goodman
August 22, 2003

TORONTO -- The Dandy Warhols have tackled a lot of subject matter over four delightfully trippy albums, delving into everything from heroin addiction to aging Hollywood trophy wives -- but a love of Canada isn't anything the band has expressed before.

Yet, in a short stop in Toronto this week to launch their new album, Welcome to the Monkey House, the Portland, Ore., quartet went Canada-crazy, covering Gordon Lightfoot at an invitation-only gig, lauding Neil Young and, not surprisingly for a band with an unapologetic fondness for drugs, commending our ever-loosening marijuana laws.

"If I could blink and move all of us and everything in our lives and Portland and everything Portland is about to Canada, I would, definitely," says the band's enigmatic lead singer, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, looking about 12 as he reclined sleepily in a west-end club after a long day of media interviews.

Keyboardist Zia McCabe, pierced and pretty with funky black cat-glasses, agreed.

"We like playing here, and we like Canada in general. We're going to be to be one of the thousands who start migrating here when the U.S. officially becomes Nazi, which seems to be happening. The marijuana laws alone are really appealing."

The next night, Taylor-Taylor and band mate Peter Holmstrom played a short acoustic set for guests at the same club, including a heartfelt cover of Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The lanky and heavily eyelinered Taylor-Taylor knew every word of the Canadian classic about a sunken Lake Superior freighter.

It was an odd song selection considering the direction the band's taken on their latest CD -- a fun revisiting of eighties synth pop partly produced by Nick Rhodes, keyboardist for Duran Duran, itself an 1980s mega-act.

Welcome to the Monkey House represents a dramatic and decidedly brave move away from what's largely regarded as the band's best CD, Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, a gorgeous, acidy swirl of a record punctuated with some guitar-heavy rock 'n' roll wallops. It was lauded by many critics as one of the best records of 2000.

The sarcastic derision of the lyrics is still there in Monkey House, but the music for the most part is breezier and boppier than in past outings.

Taylor-Taylor and McCabe make no apologies for the change in direction for the band, which is heading to Vancouver for an Aug. 29 concert and then back to Toronto for two shows on Sept. 7 and 8.

"We'd done as much wall-of-guitar as you can do," Taylor-Taylor says in his laid-back West Coast drawl.

"And besides, there's such a glut of guitar bands anyway in the last couple of years, so it was like: 'Thanks very much guys, you hold down the fort, we're doing something else.' "

Chimes in McCabe: "You can't keep making the same record."

The Dandy Warhols have been attracting some high-end attention.

Rock icon David Bowie is a huge fan, and was enthralled when he caught the band's live act at England's Glastonbury rock festival three years ago.

"Bowie knew every word to every song; he knew all the records," Taylor-Taylor remembers.

"Could anything be more flattering than that?" McCabe says.

Bowie's longtime producer, Tony Visconti, produced some of the Welcome to the Monkey House, and the band samples Bowie's '80s hit Fashion on one of the tracks, I Am The Scientist.

The Dandy Warhols now count Bowie as a pal, and will tour with him this fall, Taylor-Taylor says.

"We hang out and stuff. It's nice to hang out with Bowie. He doesn't sit around and hang out and get stoned and stuff, but you know, he's very cool."

"He's still cool. Lots of people used to be cool, but David Bowie is actually the only one that still is cool. And Neil Young, but he was never the same kind of cool. It's a different kind of cool," says Taylor-Taylor, whose lyric "I'd rather be cool than be loved" from the band's second album, Come Down, is seeming suddenly autobiographical.

He starts to perk up now, sitting up slightly from his sprawling repose and adjusting the cap perched on his new Mohawk haircut to tell how his father once met Young.

"He met him and said he was great. Neil Young is a beautiful man. A nice, quiet, groovy man. He's so great. He is just so great." He sighs dreamily and lies down again.

But back to the Dandy Warhols. The band's next move is to release what they call the Black Album, a collection of songs that was their first attempt at Come Down.

"It is so good," McCabe says "We left it to age like a good wine, and it has. We want to release it in January, and we want it out, as is."

"It is so exactly the moment. It captured a moment in our lives. It's so exactly what it is. Nothing happened to it later that sucked any of the life out of it; it is just perfect."

And for any fans who preferred the Warhols' druggy sound to the poppier eighties feel of Monkey House, the Black Album might offer a welcome return to their spaced-out roots.

As Taylor-Taylor describes it, rubbing his eyes but clearly ever-passionate about his music: "It's that one you did when you started out when you were doing a lot of narcotics. It is soooooo cool."