The Dandy Warhols: "Portland’s always had a different approach to things – it’s always a little tongue-in-cheek and less serious"

The Dandy Warhols have always been an interesting bunch, existing slightly outside the mainstream narrative of American alternative rock. Too psychedelic for grunge purists, too pop-savvy for the underground, they’ve nonetheless remained quietly influential in both realms.

Since emerging from Portland in the mid-’90s, they’ve built a catalogue that’s outlasted many of their contemporaries, balancing cult credibility with unexpected commercial reach. Now, with the release of Pin Ups – a record that revisits the songs and artists that shaped their sound – it’s an especially timely moment to chat to guitarist Peter Holmström.

Pin Ups is a meticulously curated covers album that ransacks the band’s catalogue for reinterpretations, deep cuts and long-shelved recordings. Thus, rather than a conventional covers record, Pin Ups plays like a parallel history of The Dandy Warhols. Curious it is to listen to the band’s psychedelic reworking of The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’; their pop-doused version of The Runaways’ ‘Cherrybomb’; their faithful rendering of The Byrds’ ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’; or their surf-flavoured take on The Cramps’ ‘Goo Goo Muck’.

In 1973, Bowie wrote a similar love letter to the likes of Them, Pink Floyd, The Who, Pretty Things and The Kinks, calling it Pin Ups – hence the Dandys’ title is also an homage to post Aladdin Sane/proto–Diamond Dogs David.

The Dandy Warhols formed in early 1994 in Portland, Oregan, 200 miles south of a Seattle that was experiencing the fallout of what had been the grunge nuclear explosion. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains were still eating up the airwaves, column inches and MTV.

Few commentators were looking at Portland, but Portland didn’t give a fuck. It rarely does. Portlander musicians were carving out their own sound – more laid-back, bohemian, experimental and art-school influenced.

MORE PLAYFUL

“Portland,” Peter Holmström explains, “was sort of forgotten, skipped over, not a lot going on. Seattle was the big thing, obviously, in this area of the world. So in Portland, there was lots of that post-grunge thing, but it was a little less angsty and a little more playful. Portland’s always had a different approach to things – it’s always a little tongue-in-cheek and less serious.”

While major labels swarmed Seattle, Portland remained affordable, overlooked and creatively loose. Rents were low and part-time work could sustain a life in music. Basements, warehouses and small clubs, meanwhile, doubled as rehearsal spaces. Culturally, the city leaned toward bohemian slackerism – thrift-store fashion, coffeehouse hangouts, zines, art-school influences and a strong DIY ethic.

Musically, it was a mosaic of garage punk, psychedelia, indie rock, experimental noise and emerging lo-fi pop. Indeed, Elliott Smith was playing the scene with his band, Heatmiser, while developing the stripped back, intimate style that would later define his highly influential solo career.

Peter recalls that while he was in high school, local dance-pop duo Nu Shooz achieved a global hit with ‘I Can’t Wait’; Crazy 8s were bossing the underground with their blend of heavy funk, rock and punk; and fellow funk rockers, the Dan Reed Network, went on to open for The Rolling Stones.

“There were also the cool bands bubbling up,” adds Holmstrom, “of which Courtney was always the drummer. That was always interesting, seeing who he was playing with.”
Courtney, is of course, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, frontman of The Dandy Warhols. I wonder where they first met.

“Well,” Peter remembers, “the story is I met Courtney at a summer music camp, for bands and orchestra, but that’s not technically true. I was aware of Courtney, but Courtney did not become aware of me. He’s a year-and-a-half older, and he was definitely the cool kid. I was not yet a cool kid, if I ever was. But maybe a year later, a band that he ended up playing drums in, I think very briefly, played at my high school.

“A really good friend of mine I was playing music with, or trying to play music with, ended up meeting him. That was sort of the beginning, because they ended up having a couple of bands together. They did really interesting things, something almost happened and then fell apart. But it was because of that I met Courtney.

“He actually introduced me to the people that were in my first band. We had a number of different names, but we ended up with The Dilemma Stacked. I like to say we were Portland’s first goth band. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m going with it.”

BEGUILING HUMOUR

Great it is to hear, on Pin Ups, the band having a good time with Violent Femmes’ ‘Kiss Off’, with a beguiling humour that runs through much of the band’s catalogue. Rather wonderfully, it also features Dandy multi-instrumentalist Zia McCabe on lead vocals.

“After we did that,” Peter smiles, “we were seriously thinking of putting together a side project where Zia was the front person for this little pop punk band.”

It’s a Warhols tenet – the ability to not take themselves too seriously.

“We came out of that post-grunge thing in Portland,” Peter explains. “We were rebelling against everybody’s gloomy outlook – we were dressing up and goofing off. We didn’t take anything seriously except the music. The shows were fun, everything was fun, we gave everything funny names. There was a lot of tongue-in-cheek, and all the other more established bands outside of Portland hated us for it. We never got asked to play with the more popular bands at that point.”

Seattle and Portland, often lazily grouped together as twin outposts of the Pacific Northwest, have long operated on distinct cultural and economic frequencies. Seattle grew into a global city, shaped by corporate powerhouses such as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing, its skyline and identity defined by rapid expansion, tech wealth and international ambition.

Portland, by contrast, cultivated a smaller-scale, fiercely local ethos – more suspicious of corporate dominance, more invested in DIY culture, independent business and creative communities. Where Seattle’s economy leaned toward global commerce and innovation, Portland’s thrived on craft industries, music scenes, art spaces and alternative lifestyles.
The Dandy Warhols were first signed to a small Portland indie label, Tim/Kerr Records, in the mid-’90s, after building local buzz through relentless gigging and DIY demos on the city’s underground circuit.

“Our first show was at this club called The X-Ray Café,” Peter recalls. “It was an all-age venue with that anything goes attitude. You could start a band on Sunday and play your first show on Wednesday. It was just super-loose, a lot of street kids hung out there, everybody was a character. We didn’t really fit well with that scene, just because Courtney and I, and our drummer at the time, were all a little bit older than most of the kids.

“But we still played a number of times. It was very important in allowing us to be whatever we wanted. There’s also the Satyricon, which is kind of Portland’s version of CBGBs – it’s the first venue I ever played. And supposedly, Kurt Cobain met Courtney Love there, fact or not.

“Tim Kerr actually supplied the money for our friend Thor Lindsey to start a label. Thor was a truly great, outrageous character that loved music and was a terrible businessman. But he had a huge impact on us – signing us and being super encouraging.”

The Dandy Warhols. Credit: Nicole Nodland

Impressed by their debut, the sprawling psychedelic effort Dandys Rule OK, Capitol Records signed the band. The Dandy Warhols Come Down tightened their sound into hooky dream-pop, while Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia crowned the journey with polished melodies and the era-defining anthem ‘Bohemian Like You’. I wonder do some songs on Pin Ups stretch as far back as that early period.

SUBLIME COVER

“Songs that we would have covered,” Peter details, “are owned by Capitol Records or Universal Music Group, so they are not a part of this compilation. There’s a whole bunch more covers that we couldn’t put on because of that. These are all songs that came up here and there, which we thought would be really cool to cover.

“Songs like America’s ‘Sister Golden Hair’, The Byrds’ ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ and Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’ were really introduced to us when Brent joined the band. That was the music his dad listened to, so he was just sitting on the tourbus, strumming guitars, singing a bunch of those – so they became part of our thing.”

Intriguingly, a sublime cover of Gang Of Four’s ‘What We All Want’ occurred after meeting the band’s bassist Dave Allen, who ended up living in Portland.

“When the original Gang Of Four line-up got back together,” Peter notes, “they asked us to do a remix. It was the first remix I had ever done. Nobody else in the band was around, so I had to do it all myself, and that was ‘What We All Want’. So when Andy Gill was putting together his compilation of covers, which ended up coming out posthumously, that was the one I wanted to do.”

Pin Ups arrives at a moment of renewed creative momentum for The Dandy Warhols. Their most recent LP is 2024’s Rockmaker, vividly described in these pages by Edwin McFee as, “born from an urge to worship at the altar of The Riff and re-embrace rock in the wake of their three-and-a-half-hour 2020 album, Tafelmusik Means More When You’re Alone”.

That album featured high-profile collaborations with Slash, Frank Black and Debbie Harry. Rather than treating it as a standalone project, the group expanded its ideas further with 2025’s Rock ReMaker, a companion EP that reworked the material into broader sonic forms, featuring collaborations with GLOK (Andy Bell), Trentemøller, A Place To Bury Strangers, Night Club and Melvin Brannon II.

Alongside these releases, The Dandy Warhols have also explored new live contexts, most notably through two performances with the Oregon Symphony. For Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the experience reshaped his understanding of what their music could achieve in a live setting, with the frontman enthusing that, “Nothing compares to us playing with the Symphony.”

It marks another exciting chapter in the story of The Dandy Warhols – who continue to be motivated by an infectious sense of adventure.

• Pin Ups is out this Friday, March 20. An exclusive vinyl edition is available to pre-order now via The Dandy Warhols’ official Bandcamp page.