Interview: Courtney Taylor, lead singer, The Dandy Warhols By Karl Whitney - - - - What follows is the full, unedited text of an interview I conducted with the Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor over the phone, for UCD newspaper The College Tribune in February 2001. Only a small, highly edited part was published. The actual interview ran to well over half an hour, and found Taylor in highly revealing form, offering opinions on anything from the ‘new’ president of the United States, George W. Bush, to his band’s own invention, the ‘Napster game.’ I rang him in a hotel in Germany, where the Dandy Warhols had just played. - - - - Karl Whitney: How is Berlin treating you? Courtney Taylor: Em, I like it. KW: I haven’t been there, I hear good things. CT: I like it everywhere. I’m pretty easy. KW: So, you’re playing in Dublin on the 26th of March. CT: Yeah, we’re excited man, we’ve never been there. We’ve never been to Ireland, and we’ve always wanted to, everybody says it’s just amazing, and it looks so cool and so great there. KW: Well, there’s a real buzz about Dublin at the moment. CT: The new hot city. KW: For the moment, anyway. So are you playing much of a tour; a world tour, or anything like that? CT: We’re just doing [yawn] trying to get as much of it in as we can. KW: How long have you been touring Europe? Is this your first date – in Berlin? CT: Eh. My brain is kind of dysfunctional, man. I’m just thinking of how badly I snubbed our record company… KW: What did you do? CT: … last night, our German record company. Our German record company is awful. They’ve done nothing for us. The journalists that have written about us in Germany had to call the label and chase down publicity people to try to find out how to get a hold of us, or get a hold of me, or how to get videos or get anything. They had to work really hard to just get a record, you know. They had heard that we had a new record out. KW: A rumour… CT: Yeah, six months after it came out. KW: I think you were right to snub ‘em then. CT: Oh yeah, definitely. And it gets worse, like, after not giving a fuck about us they book some, like, band of 15 year old angry Limp Bizkit wannabe German kids, they just decide that they’re gonna open for us. So we show up and these kids, these fuckin runny-nose, huge pants kids, just do their ridiculous little, you know, oh it was just amazing, like how their record label, who the fuck do they think they are? KW: German’s have notoriously strange taste in music, though. Every so often… CT: Well, they just didn’t think. They wanted this little band to be seen by a lot of people. It just didn’t occur to them that nobody in that room has any interest in that kind of jackass behaviour. Of dumb kids. Who cares? Nobody in that room was ever a dumb kid, and no-one gives a fuck about dumb kids. And that’s what my band is about. We’re not the dumb kids, we’re the little weirdo smarty outcasts, you know? That’s who we are. KW: Would you see yourselves in opposition to Limp Bizkit, dumbass sort-of rock bands. Like Dandy Warhols are the smart alternative. CT: Yeah.Yeah, we’re the unpopular kids. Yea. They can just fuckin have it, you know. They leave us alone, they don’t even notice us. If they do, we’re just weirdoes. And that’s fine; that’s the way it should be. So, our stupid-ass label goes and sticks this dumb little kid band in there. Fuckin A. So I just had to go off. I just had to. KW: Did you have a go at them on stage? CT: Yeah. You know, it was casual, casually done. And that was it, so I did before we played, when I first found out that there were some fuckin stupid kids in there, I went next door to the restaurant where a couple of guys from the restaurant were hanging out. Of course, they had just that minute showed up. They hadn’t been there – we had been there for a day already – they hadn’t shown up to help us out with anything. And in Hamburg they didn’t even send a rep out at all: I didn’t even hear from one. So I went next door and I unloaded. Basically, the whole thing I just told you was directed from about three feet away to our product manager or whatever. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Are you just going to take advantage of us like that? These people here are here for one reason; it has nothing to do with you. Your label has done fuck all for us. We do not exist to you: you can’t find our records in stores, journalists can’t get interviews. You do nothing for us. The only reason we’re here and that there’s anybody in the club next door is because a TV show in Germany plays the fuck out of our videos. That’s why. Not because you help out at all.” You know, it’s just like: and do you think that any of those fuckin people give a shit about a bunch of fuckin ten year olds that try to act like they have something to be pissed off about? It’s just loud, stupid and, basically, funny in a disgusting and nauseatingly absurd way. KW: Obviously the record company didn’t have a clue what you were about. They hadn’t even considered that you might have objections to it. CT: And Germany is not a small fuckin region. It’s a pretty big-ass country. KW: What were the crowd like, anyway? CT: Our crowd is the same everywhere: they’re smart, they’re attentive, they just want to fuckin trip out, they want it to be thick and gooey, you know? They want some energy, but they want some, like, trance to happen. And that’s what we want, and that’s what we do, and the crowds are the same everywhere in the world we go. We have the same types of people, and that’s fuckin beautiful – it’s what we intended on doing in the first place. KW: So, it’s a pleasure to play to crowds like that… CT: Oh, it’s unbelievable. KW: Let’s say when you play for a festival-type crowd. Do you notice the difference? CT: Yeah, then you notice what country you’re in. But when we play, we’re in our country, no matter where the fuck we are. If you have to pay to get in, get a ticket, or [inaudible] your way into this sold out show in Cologne or Hamburg or whatever, you’re our people. You’re our nationality. It’s the same everywhere, you know. KW: When you were growing up, listening to music, getting into it, did you have bands like that: that you felt spoke to you, and spoke to your kind of people? CT: Yeah, I always thought there was. I was pretty surprised to find out… there wasn’t. KW: It’s always a surprise, because you kind of idealise… CT: …Yeah, like, famous people. You think there’s a great clique of really smart enlightened people that all do things: they make movies, they make art, they do great things, they’re all friends. Not really; not really. KW: It’s very disappointing when you find that out. CT: …Really disappointing. So, you know, that’s like, I guess that’s probably why the Seattle scene in the 90’s got so hugely popular, because they were a bunch of bands that had played in bands together, they were all friends, they dressed alike, felt alike, you know… KW: And I think maybe they were supportive of each other – well, some of them were. And it’s a good thing to have some kind of community spirit, or whatever you want to call it, because there’s so little of that out there – especially amongst rock bands. There’s a certain bitchiness – which is good, I think, and funny, in its place, but when there’s a bunch of band that have a lot in common… CT: Even bands that don’t, like when we took JJ72 out on tour, last time we toured England. They were great. Talk about completely different, you know, as people. They’re kids and they’re all naïve. KW: They’re from Dublin, as well. CT: Yeah, you talk like Mark. KW: They’re doing brilliantly well, and they’re getting – that whole thing you were saying about getting a crowd that’s the same everywhere – I think that’s happening for them, and it’s impressive to watch. CT: Yeah, well it’ll be interesting to see how far it can go, cos basically all he does is he yells at his girlfriend for about 30 minutes, then he cries for about one song for about five minutes, and then he yells at her for about 15 more minutes and that’s the show. And it’s kind of like, I’m interested to see how popular one can get doing that. It’s so funny, like we were about two weeks in when I finally just realised it: sitting there watching him going ‘God, I love this band, but there’s something that really bugs me about ‘em though.’ And then it was like: Oh! all he does is fuckin bitch at his girlfriend: he gets onstage and he yells at her, he just fucking screams at her. He gets super pissed off at his bitch girlfriend: he hates her, he loves her. KW: It’s a rollercoaster ride of emotion. CT: Oh God, he just fucking loses it. And then he… he cries a little, y’know, and plays a slower song, real quiet, you know. He’s below in his room now and he’s crying. Okay, now here he goes again, he’s just got on the phone to her, and he’s pissed again. Amazing. KW: Did you play many dates with them? It sounds like you worked out their pattern. CT: Yeah, we were out for awhile, man. We partied. Yeah, they were like: okay, we’re learning, we’re getting it, y’know. Yeah, it was funny. I got some dirt on those guys. KW: You can blackmail them in the future. CT: Yeah… um, I would never fuck with those little fellers. [laughter] KW: You came to attention for a lot of people on MTV with your video… CT: Junkie [‘Not if you were the last Junkie on Earth’, from the Dandies’ 1997 album The Dandy Warhols Come Down]. -------- Karl Whitney | Dumb Riffs