“I realised then I was just different than they were,” says Courtney Taylor-Taylor. Pretty much from here on out, he told himself, “It’s me against them. Earrings, high hair, eyeliner, army boots, Mom’s blouse – it all started that day.”
The Dandy Warhols singer and guitarist is recounting the day in high school when the “jocks” huddled in the corridor referred to Debbie Harry from Blondie as a “skanky ho”. Taylor couldn’t believe his ears: he’d just seen the band on Saturday Night Live, that weekend in 1979, and had been captivated.
His admiration of Harry was unequivocal. “It really got to me as a 13-year-old. It just hit my pubescent young-man-ness. That was the most beautiful, exotic female experience of my life up to that point.”
Now the story has come full circle: the Blondie siren is one of a trio of blue-chip collaborators on the Dandys’ 12th studio LP, Rockmaker, alongside the mighty Slash and Black Francis. “It is truly like an angel appearing before you,” Taylor says about the track Harry sings on, I Will Never Stop Loving You.
“She is great about making a vocal part her own,” he says. “The track has a kind of grindy vibe initially. Then, when her voice comes in, it gives the song such a lift and sense of relief.” The resulting track sounds, in Taylor’s estimation, like Nick Cave making a stab at a James Bond theme.
Taylor is speaking, in his spaced-out west-coast drawl, from his home in Portland, Oregon. (When he hears my accent he enthuses about the last time he was in Belfast, around 2016, when he frequented the Crown bar and played a gig at that “sweaty little box” the Limelight.) He describes the new album as a mix of punk and metal – but mainly metal – that resulted from the band’s dissatisfaction with the music around them.
“Four years ago, when we started it, there weren’t really any bands that were making super heavy guitar records. People just weren’t doing or making it the way that we love it.” (”Now there are,” he says, laughing, “as it took us so long to get the record out.”)
During the pandemic, the Dandys posted a series of 30-second songs, plus accompanying videos, online. One of these “Fast Friday” tracks, called We Don’t Need to Make America Hate Again, appears on Rockmaker, now in a fully developed version, as The Summer of Hate. Its lyrics are uncompromising: “I want to get down. Lay on the floor. I can’t remember what it’s like to not feel nervous / I was born in the summer of love. And I’ve lived through the summer of hate.”
We are just an art-rock band. We have got our fan base, but we’re not making a blip on global popular culture
This is, says Taylor, one of the scariest times he can remember to be an American. A few years ago he referred to politics as a joke. “Now it’s a cruel joke,” he says. “It’s the calm before the storm, I guess. Stupid, stupid, awful people are calling the shots in America – maybe in the world. It’s very frightening. I’ve grown up as a leftie and been considered pretty far left, and I look at these people that consider themselves very far left. They’re just extremists with no vision of the future. I really can’t tell the difference between either side’s extremism.”
He is also dismayed by Portland’s response to its homelessness problem. “To live in a city around other people is a tacit social contract to be accepting, to contribute and pay taxes,” he says. “The homeless crisis is the big one. We have raised over half a billion in taxes over the last few years to fix it and nothing has changed. People living in the mud, staying high all the time so that they can deal with it: is this where we are? We need real leaders.”
A leader – a pioneer – in musical terms is Taylor’s fellow American, Black Francis, who appears on Rockmaker thanks to Taylor being able to hook him and his teenage sons up on a private tour of the HR Giger Museum, in Switzerland. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you,” the Pixies singer told Taylor in response – and Taylor didn’t hang around before taking him up on the offer. Black Francis ended up on two tracks on the album, Danzig with Myself and Love Thyself, after Pete Holmström, the Warhols’ guitarist, initially sent him the wrong song. “To have him on two songs, it’s so cool. We are very pleased about that particular f**k-up,” Taylor says, laughing.
He seems most buzzed about Slash’s playing on I’d Like to Help You with Your Problem, their recent single. They’d asked the Guns N’ Roses guitarist to give them some “LSD Vietnam vet rock” – and were euphoric when he sent his parts for the track. “We couldn’t believe it, man. It’s not just riffs: it’s textural, stereo, trippy, harmonic complexity. It gets to the breakdown and he puts in these Middle Eastern, really fast riff scales. We were high-fiving each other in the studio, just looking at each other. You get a guy like that because he can do something you cannot. None of us are even close to being able to work that out.”
The Dandy Warhols broke through globally in 2001, four years after their major-label debut, thanks to Vodafone’s use of their song Bohemian Like You in its advertising, which turned the re-released track into a smash hit. Do they ever get tired of it? “It’s awesome,” says Taylor. “When it comes on in pizza joints it always just sounds very, very good to me. It was built correctly and stood the test of time. It’s just a really great piece of music. That was our experiment in making a late-60s record at a time when rap-rock and radio grunge were it.”
The Dandy Warhols started coming to Dublin in the mid-1990s. It and Belfast “are two of the rowdiest cities. Ireland is known as a musical-as-f**k place for a very good reason. I started to not love the whole Dublin experience right near the end of our busier touring years, because it had become a hot destination for drunk English teenagers,” he says. “It was sad to see that happen, as the 1990s were pretty wild and free – there were no cameras on cellphones; it was fun and easy to show up in a family-owned pub, get a lock-in and hang out all night.”
Did Taylor ever collaborate or spend time with Shane MacGowan or Sinéad O’Connor? He would have loved to have met MacGowan but it never happened, he says. He did briefly meet O’Connor, though, after she sang on Jackie Is It My Birthday?, by The Wolfmen, which he engineered and mixed. “Jesus Christ, when we got those tracks back, you bring up Sinéad O’Connor’s voice in your own studio – I’m getting a knot in my stomach thinking about it. It was amazing, super-identifiable.”
He says they’ve worked out how to balance being in a rock band with having their own lives. “We had already learned what we thought was the right amount of work to do that would be damaging to our bond together as humans – not just as artists – to go out in the world and face the world together. We just really have boundaries – personal boundaries and boundaries as a band. We didn’t want to open for huge bands that we didn’t like. You turn people off in the industry when you say no to them.”
Taylor remains grounded about the band’s current reach. “We are just an art-rock band. We have got our fan base, but we’re not making a blip on global popular culture. Taylor Swift doesn’t know who the f**k we are.”
Rockmaker is released by Sunset Blvd Records
