Though best known in their native U.S. as the subject of the cult-favorite music documentary Dig!, the Dandy Warhols are celebrated across the Atlantic for the swaggering “Bohemian Like You,” which soared into the U.K. Top Ten in the fall of 2001 after featuring in an advertisement for mobile network operator Vodafone.
Frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor and lead guitarist Peter Holmström formed the Dandy Warhols in 1994 after meeting at Cascade College in Portland, Ore. Drummer Eric Hedford and keyboardist Zia McCabe rounded out the original lineup, which landed a deal with local indie Tim/Kerr Records following its first live gig. The group’s 1995 debut album Dandys Rule OK spawned the college radio hit “The Dandy Warhols T.V. Theme Song,” whose video appeared on MTV’s weekly alternative rock showcase 120 Minutes. “[Spiritualized’s] Lazer Guided Melodies was a huge influence,” Taylor recalled to The New Zealand Herald in 2003. “We wanted to create a wall of sound.”
Dandys Rule OK’s unexpected success incited a major-label bidding war, and the Dandy Warhols signed to Capitol Records to begin work on their follow-up LP. …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, released in 1997, eschewed the garage rock influences of the debut in favor of a more focused psychedelic pop sound; its second single, “Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth,” was dedicated to frenemy band the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who responded by dedicating their own “Not If You Were the Last Dandy on Earth” to Taylor-Taylor. The fates of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre would remain entwined for years to come.
“Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth” — accompanied by a bonkers music video directed by famed fashion photographer David LaChapelle — only made it to number 31 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart but climbed to number 13 on the U.K. Singles Chart. Two additional singles from …The Dandy Warhols Come Down, “Every Day Should Be a Holiday” and “Boys Better,” also reached the British Top 40, setting the stage for 2000’s Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, the first Dandy Warhols record to feature new drummer Brent ‘Fathead’ DeBoer, Taylor-Taylor’s cousin, who joined the group when Hedford resigned midway through the Come Down tour.
The Dandy Warhols recorded Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia during the winter of 1999 in an empty Portland gymnasium. “Bohemian Like You,” the album’s second single, was inspired by a young woman whose car pulled up outside Taylor-Taylor’s Portland apartment: “Before the Dandy Warhols signed to [Capitol], I was a mechanic, so I knew the vehicle: a 1980-81 BMW 320i with a primer quarter panel — the ubiquitous affordable BMW,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “The driver was this super-cool-looking woman with bleached hair piled up with black roots and a shirt worn over a pink top. The lights changed and off she went, just as I’d started thinking that if the car stalled, I could go down and say ‘Hey, I can fix that.’ Instead, I cranked out ‘Bohemian Like You’ in around five minutes. The guitar part came first — a hamfisted imitation of the Rolling Stones: a classic caveman blues-rock riff to hammer on. The lyrics and the title summed up the girl — her tattoos, the car — and the way the Dandys dressed then, straight out of second-hand thrift stores. My mom called us ‘hipsters,’ but ‘Bohemian Like You’ sounded better than ‘Hipster Like You.’”
Taylor-Taylor first played the “Bohemian Like You” demo for his bandmates on a tour bus motoring across the Netherlands. “We didn’t give that song any more credence than the others until we came to record it,” DeBoer admitted. “I remember Courtney bashing out the riff, and Pete [Holmström] and I glanced across at each other and I thought ‘Wow, I’m going to play on a hit record.’” DeBoer’s instincts proved incorrect, at least at first. “Bohemian Like You” was a resounding commercial disappointment following its July 11, 2000 release, peaking at number 42 in Britain, and the Dandy Warhols returned to Portland to begin working on new material. More than a year later, however, creative agency WCRS selected “Bohemian Like You” for use in a new Vodafone campaign, and the single was re-released on Oct. 9, 2001, soaring to number five on the U.K. charts. “We got a phone call saying ‘“Bohemian Like You” has become huge from being on the advert! Come back!’” Taylor-Taylor told The Independent. “It was the best early Christmas present ever. People who ignored our phone calls last time round were kissing our asses, saying ‘You really deserve this. I’m so happy — we knew it would be big.’ Oh, now you get it? Well, fuck you!”
The Dandy Warhols followed “Bohemian Like You” with 2003’s synthpop-inspired Welcome to the Monkey House, produced by Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, and closed out the year with a series of European tour dates in support of David Bowie, an avowed Dandys fan since witnessing their performance at the 2000 Glastonbury Festival. The band continued making headlines with the release of director Ondi Timoner’s documentary Dig!, which portrays the love-hate relationship between the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Dig!, assembled from more than 2,500 hours of footage, won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, although its stars were less than smitten: the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s official website called the film “at best a series of punch-ups and mishaps taken out of context, and at worst bold faced lies and misrepresentation of fact,” while Taylor-Taylor told The Big Issue “It’s a movie, not a documentary. [Timoner] worked her ass off and forged a plot when there was no plot. She crafted the thing to swell and ebb by taking eight years of us and a year and a half of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and it looks like a rock documentary, but in fact it’s just fucked with the memories of my life.”
The Dandy Warhols returned to their classic psychedelic sound for 2005’s critically divisive Odditorium or Warlords of Mars, their final Capitol effort; …Earth to the Dandy Warhols… followed in 2008 on the band’s own Beat the World Records. The Dandys are still active as of this writing in July 2023, but “Bohemian Like You” remains the group’s towering achievement. “The first time I heard the song in public, I’d taken a CD of the finished mix to the Sway bar in New York, which was packed with the celebs of the day: Liv Tyler, Jude Law and so on,” Taylor-Taylor told The Guardian. “I knew the DJ, and when he put the CD on, people crowded on to the dancefloor. When the guitar riff came in there was this little roar, then people who’d never heard the song were pumping fists and singing the ‘Ooh ooh ooh.’ I saw my future right there.”
Bohemian Like You (KORD-0069)
