Excess All Areas

Revolver Magazine
by Mike Gee
October 9, 2000


Lock up your daughters, the last great rock n’ roll band are in town. Courtney Taylor from The Dandy Warhols talks Robbie Wiliams, Radiohead and sex. Lots of sex.

Rust never sleeps and neither does Courtney Taylor. Every time I talk to the last great rock’n’roll star he’s either jet-lagged or just shagged. The first time, on the last Australian tour, he’d spent most of the night swapping telephone numbers and addresses with a Sydney woman of inestimable passion. A few months back, at the time of the release of The Dandy Warhols excellent Thirteen tales From Urban Bohemia, he’d just got back from England and was hungover and jetlagged, in bed and appeared to have company.

“Okay, check this out,” he says in that deep, gutteral, hung-out drawl. “I got back from Europe a week ago to Portland, Oregon. So I’m in that time zone so I’ve been waking up 5:30 or six in the morning and getting to bed at 10pm. So I get up on Tuesday morning at 5:30am, spend all day Tuesday awake, then I have to catch a flight at 4am. I don’t go to sleep because I end up having a couple of drinks which leads to dinner and an entire bottle of wine which then leads to my house, more drinks, which then leads to another bar; more drinks, close the bar, stay there with the people that work there drinking until 3am. So it started at 6pm, so now I’m hungover and really fucking miserable. Get on another flight, kind of sitting up half awake, half asleep. Get to where I am now which is Atlanta, Georgia, make it to my hotel, sleep for one hour and then start doing nine 20-minute interviews. I can’t believe I sound healthier than last time you spoke to me.”
Mmm, the time before that was here in Sydney on the last tour and you’d had two hours of sleep after spending most of the night swapping telephone numbers and addresses with a Sydney woman of apparently inestimable passion. “God, she was a lovely, lovely, creature, as well,” he sighs. “Lovely.”
Well, that’s the kind of pain you can suffer isn’t it?
:”Yes, it’s okay. Seriously, if you lose sleep for anything besides sex, you’re pissed, you’re bummed, but if you lose sex for sleep it’s, well it’s as good as sleep. At least. You wake up and you feel great; you feel great about you.”
Nothing wrong with a few ladies chasing you either.
“Mmm, yes, I like to keep it that way as often as possible. It just isn’t that frequently. Really, it’s no problem.”
Then there’s the stoush with leading sex maniac and verbal diahorrearist Robbie Williams who has been having a go at our Courtney in the NME. In the Heroes & villains section, Taylor said “Watching the Robbie Williams show, y’know, the vapid, soulless rendition of vapid, soulless songs – and I use the term loosely – music is a generous term…” and that Williams was “a hero of artistic villainy”. In his tongue-in cheek response, Williams described it as “a very interesting read” and said to Taylor: “Whilst taking a break from being incredibly tepid, corporate and evil, I was reading the ‘Heroes & Villains’ section of the NME (a wonderful way to start my Tuesday morning)… A very interesting read. Now, I don’t like broccoli but it doesn’t stop it from being a vegetable does it? Good luck with everything you’ve got going on now and in the future,” kind regards Robbie Williams.” He added: “PS You smell like poo and the girls don’t like you. Enjoy your 15 minutes.”
Now them’s fighting words… “Oh that,” Taylor murmurs. “My manager read me something over the phone when I was in Warsaw… It’s not like I give a fuck. I think he’s really funny and his promotional stuff is super clever. I don’t give a shit about his music. He seems like a guy who’s doing a good job at his job.”
Well, he’s probably even more hedonistic then you. If reports are anything to go by he gets around. “Yeah, well I like that kind of thing but I really like finding one girl I really like and really turn each other on then just have sex like five to eight times a day. That’s a fucking great vacation in my book.”
Beats one-night stands or one-hour stands. You have to have some emotion. “Yeah. It’s a lot of bumping, clunky, you know, otherwise. Gosh, I wonder what that Robbie Williams guy is like as a lover? I wonder what comes out of his mouth? What does he say? What’s he do? And all that stuff.”
I don’t know but he’s supposed to be going out with Geri Halliwell who’s the opposite and hasn’t’ had sex for three years or something because she was scared of getting involved with kiss and tell guys. “She said she hadn’t had sex for three of four years? Or was she just leading people on.” Yep. This waay she and Robbie would be equal because they could both kiss and tell. “Yep, I guess so. Terrible tabloids huh. Entertainment – such a nasty fucking commercial reality when you get right down to it. I don’t have TV, I don’t have one glossy magazine in my house. I don’t look at billboards, I fucking hate that shit. I hate advertising and gossip. Who gives a fuck? Do people give a fuck? What the hell are they doing? Geri Halliwell… the only reason I know who that person is, is because I’m on the same label as her in America and Australia.”
This is all part of what makes Taylor and The Dandy Warhols great: They really don’t give a flying frog’s leg about any of the corporate, marketing and associated bullshit that scores the entertainment industry. With Thirteen Tales, Taylor just wanted the band to make a great rock’n’roll record – because nobody made them anymore. To say the least, Taylor isn’t modest when it comes to analyzing the Warhols output. And why should he? There’s few other bands that have such an apparently gut-level understanding of rock and the way it can be expressed. The Dandys understand song and they understand how to wig out. They blend subtlety and melody with flamboyance and jack-off.
“We’ve made three brilliant records,” he says. “Even Radiohead doesn’t release three brilliant records in a row. It took them years to come up with OK Computer. What a record that is… but the new one is nice.” Short. “Nice. It’s just simply nice. It’s just very blend and lovely nice. It’s not a great record. I would have rather they stayed with the big rock stuff. I like songs, you know. Kid A - my band makes that record every day at soundcheck. That’s just what comes naturally to us. Get the instruments, the loops, get the noise and all. Just say some lovely things and a little melody. What I like about Radiohead is that they are motherfuckers of songwriters – just amazing. That they decided to impress Aphex Twin or Can or whatever is like ‘Goddamnit, I waited this long for this. This is what you were doing’.”
Unsurprisingly, because Taylor is a junkie when it comes to making records, The dandy Warhols are already looking ahead to their next album. In fact, they’ve already out one song. Cop this, “The guys form Massive Attack wanted to make some music with us,” he says. “So, we went over there and recorded one song on our days off in England last month and it was just fucking brilliant. It’s so funny, it sounds like us and Massive Attack. Dripping, slow, but moving, thumping type slow groove thing going with acoustic guitars and jangly weird shit they put in. It’s us filtered through them and them adding a bunch of shit to it. God, it’s good. Those guys are fucking great. It was lovely.
“The next record will be quite a lot different again though. It’ll be more garagey, trashy, yet digitally tightly with the guitars messier and raddier. I think half the album will probably be Nick Drake meets Tricky and then the other half will probably be like the best of 1965, Psych-rock with loops, breakbeats and shit.
“It’s hard when you make a record, man. I get pretty suicidal and weirdly fucked in my head. Making a record is like looking in a mirror for six hours every day. If you got up and just sat and stared at yourself for 30 minutes every day you would just go crazy. You wouldn’t know who you were. You would not like yourself and you would love yourself and all the weird shit starts. Making a record is 14 hours of that and it just makes me insane and bitter and lonely and weird and then once we’re done with that the record then makes me feel better. So what has been destroying me is also the only thing that can validate me and ground me. By the virtue of that the record has to be beautiful and sincerely honest otherwise it doesn’t make me feel better and I would never release it at the depth of my depression. That being done we can the just go on tour and have a fucking good time.”
And he’s planning on doing that when they get to Sydney.