Yankee Doodle Dandy

Attitude
by Paul Tierney

It may have taken a TV commercial to break The Dandy Warhols, but frankly, they tell Paul Tierney, they don’t give a damn.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor, elegantly wasted front man with The Dandy Warhols, is sat in a Cuban restaurant in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, shouting down his cellphone for all the world to hear. “Can you hang on a minute, man,” he yells in a lazy, west coast drawl that could melt butter at ten paces. “Some fuckin’ idiot has turned up the music in here and it’s like fuckin’ carnival time already. Portland used to be this real quiet place,” he barks angrily, “but now it’s full of trendies with tattoos and dyed hair. Talk about cleaning up your act.”
Out in the car park, Taylor breathes in the deep lunchtime air and tries to calm himself down. It’s almost three years since 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia became the record to finally break his band, but The Dandy Warhols are still miles away from cleaning up their own display of rock and roll excess. New album Welcome To The Monkey House, may not walk with the same cocky swagger, but what it lacks in riffed-up guitar action, it makes up for with a new and somewhat surprising electronic sheen. “It just seemed we were listening to a lot more Dr. Dre than we were Bob Dylan,” he explains, “and electronic sounds were just turning us on a lot more. Those hip-hop guys have the best fuckin’ sounds, but I like melody, I like singing, and of course every club you go into now they’re playing old Gary Newman and Duran Duran records.”
Admittedly more 80s new wave than Timberland glitch-hop, it’s still a shock to discover that the producer on this new album is none other than synth grand dame, Nick Rhodes himself. “It just seemed like a neat idea,” says Taylor, “a great motivator. I’d heard that Duran Duran really loved our last record, and we wanted to get into synthesisers, so why not? We did try to get Nick to come to Portland,” he laughs, “but he’s so chi-chi that that was never going to happen.”
Your timing’s sort of perfect, though. Guitars are so last century.
“I guess so. Fuck, it might be two years too late, but that doesn’t really matter to me. It’s not like we decided to become Kraftwerk or anything. We’re still a big pack of stoners and trippers, we still like that gooey, psychedelic feeling.”
Audibly more relaxed, Taylor seems less interested in talking up his product than spinning off in semi-lucid tangents on whatever takes his fancy. We chat about the power of the TV commercial and how Vodafone helped Bohemian Like You become their biggest hit to date. “I don’t mind,” he says nonchalantly, “I like products. Fuck, if tampons wanted to use one of my songs, I’d be like, fine, tampons are good things, whatever.”
And then there’s his legions of gay fans. What, pray, does he make of them?
“Awesome. Love it,” he coos. “Yeah, the gay scene – that’s where the fun is, man. That’s where everybody wants to cross dress and live it up, lose their head and just be sexy. We were the only live band in the mid 90s that our gay friends could get on the tables with their shirts off and get down too. Yeah, we count on it, it’s important,” he states positively. “You can lose yourself in the shitty backstage world of rock, so the gay thing for us is much more interesting!”