The Dandy Warhols are Ahead of the Curve
Interview by Tom Chandler

The Dandy Warhols are coming to town. Although they've often worn their influences on their sleeves, the Warhols have a knack for filtering everything into a sound that's uniquely their own. Their latest disc Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, has a pop sheen, but also a densely layered subtlety. There's everything from tight pop tunes to epic jams. After the notoriety brought them by the movie Dig! (which details their love/hate relationship with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and its frontman Anton Newcomb, it's nice to get back to paying attention to the Dandy's music. The Warhol's guitarist Peter Holmstrom was kind enough to talk with us for a few minutes.

Tom Chandler: So you're calling from Australia?

Peter Holmstrom: Things are always great in Australia.

TC: That's what I've heard.

PH: Every time we come down here, the weather seems to be nice. Everybody seems to be having a good time.

TC: You've never been attacked by a kangaroo or anything?

PH: No, nothing like that.

TC: I've heard the wombats are pretty mean.

PH: The wombats are pretty mean, actually. But they're really sleepy most of the time, so you don't have to worry. Plus, they can't really get their teeth around any body parts like your ankle.

TC: When you play live, do you reinvent things, or do you try to replicate the album?

PH: No, we've never tried to replicate the albums. We realized pretty early on that that was not gonna happen. In the studio we just go too far. On this album, we've even got songs that we'll never play live. Even though they were played live in the first place, they were just that moment in time. It's really difficult to recapture that same feeling.

TC: How was recording the Odditorium different for you than things you've done in the past?

PH: It was the most comfortable record to make. There's no one way we did anything. We played some of the songs live, a few of them were just made up on the spot, little jams. Not little jams I guess, eight or fifteen minutes long! And then there were other things that were built up from maybe a little snippet of something, a little guitar melody, looped it and turned that into a song.

TC: Does anyone come in with a finished song?

PH: In the past that has happened, yeah. I guess "Insane" was that way on this record. That was the one fully complete song that came in.

TC: Do you think that the movie Dig! helped you or hurt you?

PH: I'm still kind of out on that one. I think it's done both. It got us a little bit more attention, a broader spectrum of people. I know it didn't make record sales go up, but our tour of the United States is now sold out. We're used to selling out on the coasts, but the middle bits are sold out now as well. It's either got something to do with really bad reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin, or Dig!. The bad part of Dig! is the negative reviews of the album. It seems like they just went out of their way, because they didn't like the way we came across in the movie and decided to attack us for it. I'm a little too close to it, though.

TC: It seems to me that on every album you make, you take a different direction. Do you feel like you lose continuity sometimes?

PH: I think maybe we did, going from the rock thing to the more electronic thing [Welcome to the Monkey House]. That was a weird experience anyway because we had mixed our record already, and then Capitol wanted to remix the whole record. It was kind of like, Oh all right, we'll let you try. And that's the one they ended up putting out. If our version had come out, it would have made more sense. It still would have been a sparse sounding record, a little bit more electronic than our previous record. But it's a more organic recording.

TC: It seems like you were ahead of the curve anyway, because now the whole electronic dance rock thing is getting big.

PH: Yeah, we like to think we're ahead of the curve. (laughs) It'd be nice if in two years, there's eight minute psychedelic jams on the radio. But I have my doubts.