Britta was a ‘One Day Guest’ curator at Schmooze Blog choosing three favourite videos.

photo by pirlouiiiit

Dean Wareham has a in-depth article on the BOMB Magazine website detailing the process of selecting and scoring the Warhol Screen Tests used in 13 Most Beautiful.

I came home from the museum with a reel of about 40 Screen Tests, and we started thinking about music, watching individual Screen Tests, throwing different pieces of temp music at them, sometimes a cover or a half-finished song we had sitting about, and sometimes picking up guitar and keyboard and trying to conjure something simply as a response to the subject’s actions on screen. Narrowing the selection to 13 was difficult. We had to let go of a number of great subjects—Ivy Nicholson, Imu, Amy Taubin, Salvador Dalí.

Read the full essay on the BOMB Magazinbe website.

Dean Wareham

I know I don’t do this for every concert but… it was a special night (for me at least) so in honour of that here’s a round-up of what’s out there on the Internet about Dean & Britta’s recent show at The Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline.

Show organiser Lindsay Hutton who suggested the show to The Carnegie Hall has a post on Next Big Thing…

In terms of mellifluous guitar, there simply isn’t anyone that hits the intersecting vein between Tom Verlaine and the racket we must attribute to Lou reed and Sterling Morrison like Dean Wareham. The program is curated brilliantly and it requires the same of the location it plays at.

Scottish independent music magazine Is This Music? has a review and also a nice set of pictures on Flickr

But is it art? For a casual music fan it’s some great indiepop combining the best bits of Luna / Galaxie 500 that just happens to have a film show as an added bonus. Serious art historians will see it as a display of seminal pop art with a pretty authentic VU-themed score. Either way, everyone wins.

Scottish newspaper The Scotsman has a short review on their website…

“Moving portraits” of figures like Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper, who magnetises the screen with his flickering expressions of pain and rage, they allow us to recognise the individuals by their body language and facial ticks as well as their features.

Murray Ramone has immortalised the evening in song – check it out at his MySpace page and check the lyrics out on the blog post…

and after the show was over
dean came over to chat to andy
I wonder if he did know or remember
the optrex that came in so handy, back in dublin

Over on YouTube there are a couple of videos [one, two] shot from the balcony…

There’s a short review in the Dunfermline Press…

13 Most Beautiful…works not only as a touching musical homage but a piercing glance into the social history of the 1960s New York Art scene. Mesmerising stuff.

I’ll add to this post with anything else that might turn up…

The New Gay: When did you first realize you were straight?
Dean Wareham: I remember looking at dirty magazines, probably around age 10, and being aroused by photos of naked ladies. I did make out with a girl named Wendy Little at age 8 but it wasn’t particularly sexual.
Britta Phillips: When I was 7. I had fantasies about David Cassidy.

Read the full interview at The New Gay.

I think at a certain point I realized that several people are going to be upset by this and by that, and if I went back and took out every thing that was going to upset somebody, it would just be a puff-piece and not a very interesting book. And I think part of the larger point I was trying to make about being in a band is that it’s all about conflict. And so I wanted to go into some of that conflict.

Read part one of the Dean Wareham interview at Make Major Moves. Part two will be published tomorrow.

UPDATE: Part two of the interview is online now – more talk about the book, about 13 Most Beautiful and about Galaxie 500…

It’s hard to sing those songs, too. I feel like I need to cough, and I sing real high. Your voice naturally lowers as you get older, I think. And also, I didn’t know how to sing at all in Galaxie 500 [...] That’s absolutely part of the charm of it, when people say, you know, the vocals on the first Galaxie 500 album sound like I’m singing from outer space. I think I was thrown out there in front of a microphone and I’d never really been in that situation, I hadn’t practiced in front of a microphone, and I only got one take of everything. I’ve since learned that it’s on the third take that I start to get it good. It’s never the first. Sometimes the second. With vocals, that is.

Read part two of the Dean Wareham Interview at Make Major Moves.

Thursday we’ll be eating cheesesteak sandwiches in Philadelphia; before our show at Johnny Brenda’s, Friday it will be chili dogs before our gig at the Black Cat in D.C., and Saturday night we will eat and perform at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. This last is an early show – Cheval Sombre will go on at 7:30, we’ll be on at 8:30. These will likely be our last non-Warhol shows of the year, at least here in the USA.

Read the full post at Dean & Britta’s iLike blog.

Don’t be a rock star. I’ve seen people around me have their lives destroyed by drugs. It just depends on what kind of person you are. Like, some people have a “go” button and a “stop” button, and some people just have the “go” button, meaning that they take drugs and just take more, and more, and more. It could be 6 in the morning and they’ll say, “Okay, I have to get more now.” I’m not that kind of person.

Read the full interview at Decider NY

We are planning on playing a bunch of Galaxie 500 songs; we did this at the Zipper Factory last year and it was fun and I managed to hit all the high notes. The Galaxie 500 video “Fourth of July” ran on New York Noise last week, followed by amusing comments from some young children. Warning: the video contains violent war imagery in addition to gorilla and clown suits.

You can view it here; click on Episode 89, Section 1