A Dandy Talks Andy Interview

BBC
A Dandy Talks Andy
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Scoring a big hit with Bohemian Like You, following Vodafone's decision to use it in their ad campaign, The Dandy Warhols are ready to make another assault on the upper reaches of the charts with Get Off. The band are always asked about their sleazy lifestyle, but with Andy Warhol back in fashion we've quizzed singer Courtney Taylor about the man they named their band after.

When did you first become aware of Andy Warhol?
I was introduced to him first as a very bad filmmaker that was sometimes funny and kitschy. Do I like his work? No. They're not great paintings or anything. They were just clever ideas. He was an ideas guy. There's decorative language and there's holding a mirror to reality. Look at my lyrics. I'm not a poet. My lyrics say things like 'You got a great car, what's wrong with it today.' I'm utterly a hold-a-mirror-to-reality artist. Warhol did that.

So what do you really like about Warhol?
What impresses me most about Warhol and what's really been appropriate for us is he was a collector of characters. And I'm obviously a collector of characters. That's part of what we do and what we're famous for. We're notorious for being a collector of characters. I collected characters for my band and then this band of characters collects more characters. Friends, lovers.

Is that why you named the band after him?
Absolutely. We were all people who related to The Factory and that was our dream. That's the dream of cliques in every city in the world today. Dreaming the same dream as Andy. About having his friends who are all so fabulous around him: 'Aren't they neat, I'm sorry you struggled so much with your problems about the world, you're very angry, but I love it. It makes you keep your hair so cool and hip all the time. You're really cool. You're a little superstar.' And this is what we keep around us. Cool, groovy people.

But why the Dandy Warhols?
They're all junkies - all of Warhol's really great friends from that really beautiful time in his life when he was really starting to happen in the mid-60s. There was a strung-out bitter New York scene and there's a lot of burnt-out bitter-at-the-world but fabulous artists and alcoholics and junkies and coke addicts. They get bitter at lots of weird emotional flare-up stuff. So we've decided to keep things a little nicer. So we're dandy little Warhols.

Did Warhol ever see The Dandy Warhols?
He died before we started because it only took about a year and a half before Andy's friends were finding us. His last generation of intimates were coming and finding us and meeting us and watching our shows. And they all said they heard there was a band called [The Dandy Warhols] and they expected to hate us but every one of them said 'Boy, Andy would have loved you.' That was unbelievably flattering and affirming.