The Dandy Warhols Return: Zia McCabe on Pin Ups, New Music And A Bold Leap Into Visual Art

Renowned for their epic live shows, both sonically and visually, The Dandy Warhols will return to Australia and New Zealand this November and December for the Pin Ups tour. Nearly three decades into a career built on doing things their own way, The Dandy Warhols continue to push into new territory. The tour will open with a special one-night-only collaboration alongside the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at Hobart’s Odeon Theatre, transforming songs from their remarkable catalogue into an immersive orchestral experience before the band returns to its trademark live show for the remainder of the tour, culminating with an appearance at the legendary Meredith Festival. Following two acclaimed performances with the Oregon Symphony, The Dandy Warhols will bring their symphony concept to Australia for the very first time.

Australia remains one of The Dandy Warhols’ biggest and most devoted fan bases anywhere in the world, a relationship that stretches back to their first visit in 1998 and one that has only grown stronger with every return. Over the last three decades, The Dandy Warhols have created one of modern music’s most distinctive catalogues. Effortlessly blending psych-rock, shoegaze and synth-pop with an unmistakable swagger, they’ve consistently carved out a lane that is entirely their own. From timeless anthems such as Bohemian Like You, We Used To Be Friends and Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth, to their unmistakable visual aesthetic and continually evolving sound, The Dandy Warhols defined alternative rock at the turn of the millennium while continuing to influence new generations of artists. Zia McCabe talks to Rob Lyon about the tour.

Great to be talking to you. I think if there was one band we can claim and adopt as one of our own, it’d have to be the Dandy Warhols.
Yes, love to hear that!

You’ve got to be blown away by the response so far to the Australian tour. It’s a bigger tour, and the response is even bigger than last time.
I know, I just asked them to send me over the sales statistics from the last tour, and we’re outpacing the sales already from that one, which is crazy.

It’s almost like old stomping grounds when you come back to Adelaide, because I can’t remember how long ago it was when you played Thebarton Theatre with Even, and you get to go back there and play there this time.
That was one hundred years ago. Oh, is it the same venue?

Yeah! It feels one hundred years ago!
Cool. Yeah, but I heard the Cranker’s not open. What’s up with that? Thought we saved the Cranker last time!

I think it’s because they’re doing the redevelopment. I think it will be open when they’re finished. I think it’s supposed to be two years or something like that, so it’s not gone. The spirit lives on at the Ed Castle, which is further down the road. I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty of noise if that doesn’t come back.
Well, I’m gonna have to find somewhere else to DJ for this one.

Ed Castle’s pretty good, nice small venue.
Is that walking distance from the rock show?

It’s probably about a five‑minute drive.
Well, I’ll try to find somewhere walking distance, it’s better. But if not, we’ll go there.

What is it that you love about touring Australia?
The Australians!

Of course!
You know, it’s nice when we get to leave our winter and go to your summer, of course that’s special. But it’s nice to go where you’re wanted, and we always feel very wanted in Australia. It’s a great audience, you guys are really hardcore fans of music. Music is a part of your culture, and loving music and loving bands is assumed and expected, so we’re just happy to be one of the bands that you love.

This tour’s called the Pin Ups Tour. How much of the Pin Ups album are you likely to play? It must be a tough choice if you’re going to play anything from that without playing them all. How do you fit that many in, plus all the favourites?
We’re not playing any Pin Ups. I think it’s hilarious that it’s called the Pin Ups. Promoters need you to be touring off an album, it’s just the mindset, and we’ve never done that. I don’t know if you’ve seen us touring a new album… we’ll do maybe four songs off a new album, but Pin Ups is like a retrospective. It’s a collection of all the covers that we did for the extra territories and bonus tracks over the last twenty five years. I mean, we know how to play Hell’s Bells, maybe we’ll do that. Is that even on there?

I don’t think so.
I think that’s on Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols, our other covers album. Man, I don’t know. We’re going to play a few songs off each album, but none off Pin Ups, as far as I know. We don’t know those songs. I think it’s hilarious that anybody would think we would tour a covers album. We practice three times before a tour, we don’t even live in the same country anymore, right? Brent’s in Australia. So we’re just excited to go play a bunch of cool songs for Australia, do the symphony gig, do the Meredith Festival, trip each other out as much as we can, and bring as many of the audience with us as we can.

Was it always part of the plan at some stage to do a covers album, or was it just a way of documenting all these songs you might have played at shows or messed around with in the studio?
Yeah, it’s the labels. The territories want something just for themselves. So there’s all these territories, you’ve got a record, you just finally got a record done, you’re ready to put it out, and they go, “Oh, well, we need a track, we need a bonus track,” and you’re just going, well, come on, man, we just gave you everything we got. So we realised covers was the only way we could fill that order and so we would jam out covers for the different territories. Then we realized that very few people would have heard all of these covers, and there’s some really cool takes of these songs on there.

I tried to organise it a couple years back and just didn’t get very far. Peter’s really the wizard with getting our vinyl reissued and repressed. That’s totally Pete’s lane. So big ups to Pete for getting this thing over the finish line and getting it all put together and put out, because it’s a really cool collection. More than anything, it shows you what bands we love and are influenced and inspired by, because those are the songs we would choose to cover. We just thought it was only fair that all the fans have access to these, rather than just here or there. But the idea that we would learn these live and play these live… didn’t even cross our minds. This is like my tenth interview in the last two days, and they keep saying we’re doing this Pin Ups tour, and I’m like, nobody told me that.

It’s just really cool that Dandy Warhols are doing stuff like this and being bold and putting stuff like this out.
Sometimes you do stuff in the studio, sometimes you do stuff live, sometimes it’s both. But yeah, this is very much a studio album.

Probably the exciting part of the tour is your music installation as well. What’s the story behind how that actually got off the ground, and what led you to putting it on in Tassie?
David Walsh is a long time fan. We met him back when we did the Falls Fest, ages ago, 2006, I think? Ages ago and Mona wasn’t even open yet, right? I remember him taking us around through this, like, you know, catacomb‑style, like, with big… it was all dark, and just art sort of lurking everywhere, leaning against walls. We did the New Year’s countdown together, and just stayed on each other’s radar, but didn’t really see each other a whole lot. He’d be at shows, and then the fella that I’m seeing lives in Sydney, his parents just retired down to Margate in Tasmania, so a friend of a friend connected me with Martin Blackwell of Mona, and he goes, “I’ll come down, I’ll take you guys around and kind of give you the VIP day at Mona.”

As we’re walking around and seeing the art, and how just kind of out there everything is, and how an anything‑goes feeling you have when you’re there, I thought, these are my people, and if I was ever going to put this idea anywhere, this is the home for this concept and so I just spit it out. I didn’t go down there ready to pitch anything. It hadn’t even crossed my mind until the end of it. I’m like, these guys are all so fucking weird that I think I could be accepted here. They were like, “Hey, we would love to talk more about that,” so I spent the next year developing the idea, getting a really nice deck built, and then pitching it officially last March. Now, six months later, it’s well into production, and it’s been a really wild ride, and a big, big leap in visual arts for me, well beyond anything I have done up to this point.

How exciting is it to see a concept actually being fully realised now, and it’s actually starting to come together, and the plan’s actually going to get there?
It’s nuts, and that building is so full of talent. All of those fabricators, the curators and everybody that works there is so gifted, is so cool, is so talented, is so fun. They’re making my idea better every day. Every meeting when we talk back and forth about how things could work, and because there’s a lot of kinetic aspects to the arts. They’re building the furniture for me, they’re sourcing vintage pieces for me, they’re letting me down gently when certain things just aren’t going to work. It’s been such a treat to just work with such high‑calibre humans, because I’m really used to pushing my ideas uphill by myself a lot of the time, and these guys have been here for me since day one to make this something really special. I’m just so grateful.

Will you feel a bit emotional when you get back to Australia and you actually get to see it all done for the first time?
Man, I cannot wait. So I’m here now, but I won’t be in Tasmania until a later, and then that’s when I get to really start seeing the pieces. I see little bits of the prototypes and stuff, the mock‑ups, but to start to see the install is going to be wild.

Is this something that you’re likely to do more of in the future?
Yeah, the next museum I think that I would hit up would be, I think it’s called MoMA in Brisbane. I was just there, and they do a lot of stuff where I think it could be a good fit. There’s also this other structure, “the Hoog”, which is the tallest single oscillator synthesiser in the world, which got accepted to a festival in Portland, and that’s the one… I want to make multiples of those, and I want them to be semi‑permanent in different communities. My intention is to spend the next year living in my RV and going to different communities in the United States to build these giant playable synths and then next, I would come over to Australia and have a bunch of locations for that, and that one would lend itself much more to the kind of duration of a festival. The See Here Now installation is such a big build‑out that it would have to live more permanently. It’s too much for a weekend, I would imagine. We’ll see, maybe I find a way to make her more mobile.

It sounds very exciting, and it must make it hard to try and fit everything in juggling a lot of balls, and it’s hard to keep them all in the air at the same time?
That is exactly how I think about it, and it has been very challenging. I find a way to keep myself about this busy most of the time, just it’s not all such public‑facing things that I’m doing all at once. But it has been very intense and very exciting, and I do like when I’m busy, it’s a good mode for me, but I could use a couple long sleeps.

I think we all could! The other part of playing in Tasmania, which is just as exciting as well, is playing with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. That must be a huge buzz, and what a way to kick off the tour down here?
So big. We have been really struggling to get this show on the road, literally. People like to do what they know and stay in their lane, and so if you’ve got a rock promoter and you’re trying to get them to do an orchestra show, they just don’t have those contacts. They don’t know. You’ve got to forge a new path. So it’s really hard to get people motivated to do new, hard things and SBM has been really great, specifically Rob G. Giovannoni, Rob G. He’s really helped bring this together, and Mona really stepped forward and helped collaboratively, because they’ve worked with the symphony quite intimately over the years.

I was able to work with the symphony on aspects of the musical piece that’s in the installation, so I got to meet some of the TSO players a couple months ago and it’s just dovetailing so nice. We’ll do the symphony, then we have a much more intimate event the next night, and then my exhibition opens to the public on the 26th, so I’m hoping that really encourages people to travel down to experience all three.

How complicated a process was it orchestrating and coming up with the arrangements for the songs? I’m assuming that some of the Dandy Warhols songs lend themselves more easily to being orchestrated than some of the other ones?
When Tamila and Louise presented this to us, they’re both from Melbourne, but Louise lives in Portland and works here, we thought, okay, well, we’re interested, maybe do a couple of mock‑ups and show us the digital version. They said, you could do half rock show, half symphonic show if you only wanted to do arrangements for half of a set, and we thought, well, we’ll decide after we hear what this sounds like, because we were like, huh. I said, you pick the songs, because you guys can look through the lens of classical music and how to do the arrangements, and we’re going to pick songs we know. They picked some ones that we would have never thought would be good for the orchestra. Horse Pills is the one that when I saw that on there, I’m like, really? Horse Pills? Really? And it’s amazing. It’s really cool. So that was the first step, just letting the experts take over and they did such a phenomenal job with the arrangements that it is a spectacular show. It is really, really an incredible marriage, our music with the orchestra.

Do you feel the pressure playing with such elite players that literally pick this stuff up in seconds, and you’ve got to really be on your game?
It’s scary. Oh, I totally fucked up a couple songs last time, I was like, sorry, guys. I should practice like you do. Yeah, it’s really intimidating. They’re totally different creatures than we are. We’re more like the Ramones than the Symphony, you know? We’re more like the Sex Pistols than the Symphony. We’re kind of hacks, we’re punks. We make cool music, but not because we know every single thing there is to know about our instrument, and I don’t know if any of us can read music. I know next to no theory. We’re just making up cool stuff and capturing it with recording devices.

Speaking of cool stuff, is there any new Dandy Warhols music on the horizon, perhaps next year?
Next year would be good. I would love if this record… I wanted it done this year, but we all had so much going on, especially with my sculptures and installations getting accepted at the same time, I just had to completely stop working on the record. Courtney is working on his film, so he’s completely obsessed with getting that out to the festivals and stuff. Peter’s got his band, Brent’s got his two bands, so it’s been slow going. We’ve always been pretty slow between records. But we just all were in the same room, and had to listen through everything that’s there, because we were like, there were two tracks of mine that nobody had even heard yet, and they’re very, very atmospheric… ambient pieces. I really was pushing the band to try a record that was much less lyrical, and much less structured, and much more ambient, and I mean, I don’t know what the fans are going to think about it, but I love how it’s turning out, so yeah, I would like to think that we’ll have that done in 2027 at some point.

Is it a similar concept to The Auditorium and the Warlords of Mars? I absolutely love that album, is that the general flavour of where you’re going, or is it even more chilled back again?
Oh, way more chill than that, way less structured. I mean, there are lyrics for maybe three of the tracks, and I’d say at least three of the tracks are longer than ten minutes.

Oh, wow.
They’re very experimental. I mean, I want Brian Eno to be proud. I want Brian Eno to hear this and be like, cool, this is cool.

Are there any other projects that you’ve got on the go as well? Whether it’s Dandy Warhols related, or anything else that you might be able to mention?
I’ve been doing, my Brush Prairie, my countryside project. Brent’s band Immigrant Union becomes my backup band when I’m in Melbourne and we do a few shows. Richie Weed from the Tumbleweeds is going to play with us.

Oh, wicked.
Yeah, yeah, he’s awesome, he’s great. I’ve been doing some session work for this guy’s project in Sydney, and Richie sang on most of the songs, I sang on a couple, and I’ve been co‑producing the guy’s album, so I see Richie around a fair bit, and we decided to put some sets together. But yeah, I’m really, really into these installations and sculptures right now, and I think that I’ve made a pretty big pivot towards that being my main squeeze when it comes to art. And the Dandies, you know, we don’t do a lot of touring anymore. Like, we of course will drop anything to come to Australia for any reason, but otherwise it’s not our main focus. We’re getting older, being on the road is exhausting, and especially now that I’m doing these types of trips where I can stay a week to a month in each place, rather than one night. It’s hard to go back to just the grind of being in a different place every day. So definitely we’ll keep doing studio stuff, but the touring is special occasions.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Dandy Warhols on the following dates, tickets from SBM Presents…

See Here Now… After Hours With The Dandy Warhols, tickets HERE..

The Dandy Warhols with The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, tickets here…