An Evening With The Dandy Warhols

The Dandy Warhols are cooler than you, me and Johnny Depp. This is the first thing you must realise for a successful encounter.

What you must also realise, is, according to them they are responsible for the musical direction of the past 13 or so years. Except new rave, I found the person responsible for that and bludgeoned them with a flugelhorn.

“We just wanna make music that we feel people need that no-one else is making”, muses rambling front man Courtney Taylor-Taylor.

And inevitably, people will start copying that, or so he thinks. “When we released ‘…Monkey House’, everyone was into the White Stripes, The Strokes, and those bands came off the back of (previous album) ‘13 tales from Urban Bohemia’ “We had the big vintage guitar sound”. So there you go, The White Stripes aren’t as in to John Lee Hooker as you thought.

13 years must make those older songs sound pretty tired, right? Yes, and no explains guitarist Peter Holmström. “When they stop working, we’ll lay them off, even just for a show or two, and then we’ll bring ‘em back. A lot depends on the show and the crowd. If the audience freaks out, no matter how bad it sounds it’s gonna be ok”.

It’s funny that I should ask this, because the night’s set is absolutely crammed with songs from as far back as their ’95 debut, ‘Dandys rule, OK?’ They even played that one from the Vodaphone ad.

Plus, it would seem they lucked out on the oldies sounding fresh (this might be because there were hardly any students in the crowd). Really bloody good tunes like ‘Not if you were the last junkie on earth’ and ‘Horse Pills’ seem to have survived the turn of the century and new albums.

On stage, they have visibly matured, they have families and stuff now didn’t you know? Zia’s top stays on (to the disappointment of most of the crowd) and Courtney’s ‘fuck you, frat boy’ pose is a little more ‘fuck you, bank manager’.

I didn’t walk out blown away, nor did it rank among my gigs of the year (they’re hardly My Bloody Valentine, no matter how much they ape them), but it was good. Unfortunately, that’s all it was.