WHO knows what Andy Warhol's intention was in creating the series of almost 500 "screen test" films he made between 1964 and 1966?
Static film portraits of acquaintances the artist discerned to have a certain "star quality" (and many of them – Bob Dylan, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Salvador Dali, Dennis Hopper – certainly did), some of these would ultimately end up as backdro
ps to early Velvet Underground shows or collated as feature-length collections under banners such as the 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the 13 Most Beautiful Women and 50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities.
But were they meant to be part of some projected master plan, or did Warhol just want to catalogue his famous and attractive friends of the era in a somewhat voyeuristic and obsessive manner? Musician Dean Wareham, who has soundtracked a selection of 13 of these films for live performance and DVD release alongside his wife Britta Phillips, is unsure. "They're… a struggle, certainly," he says, tentatively. "Some of them are more inspiring than others, but I don't think Warhol intended the viewer to just sit and look at these things. They were made to be projected on walls at parties, so I think music makes them a lot more interesting.
"There may be some people who disagree with that, mind you, in which case they can always get the DVD and turn the music down."
For many attending the UK premiere of the live show in Dunfermline, the involvement of Wareham and Phillips will be the main draw. He was a founding member of the short-lived but critically revered late-80s American alternative trio Galaxie 500 (the other two-thirds, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, now perform as Damon & Naomi), while he and Phillips first worked together in the 1990s after she joined his follow-up band Luna. The pair, who have recorded as Dean & Britta since Luna's split in 2005, aren't strangers to film work; Phillips was the voice of animated character Jem in the 80s and also appeared alongside Julia Roberts and Liam Neeson in the film Satisfaction, while the duo more recently scored Noah Baumbach's film The Squid and the Whale together.
"13 Most Beautiful started with a call from Ben Harrison, performance curator at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh," says Wareham, who is based in New York. "We've worked with him before on performances down there. Anyway, he wanted us to try and do something with these films, because they aren't really available, aside from the odd gallery loan. These other 'Andy Warhol Presents…' films you see in stores, they were Paul Morrissey's work, but the ones we have were almost all shot by Warhol on a Bolex camera.
"Having said that, they're all static shots, so often he'd just turn the camera on and go into the other room."
By its very nature, the project is saturated with the zeitgeist of the late-60s New York Factory scene, and Wareham and Phillips have recognised this by covering Bob Dylan's I'll Keep It With Mine to use alongside footage of Nico (for whom the song was written) and scoring the Lou Reed film with a version of the Velvet Underground's Not A Young Man Any More. Wareham readily acknowledges the irony at work in the latter pairing. Yet did they feel the need to try to write their own contributions as period pieces, or did he just follow his instincts? "Certainly, those thoughts ran through our heads," he says. "You know – 'what would Warhol want?'
"But, ultimately, they don't really lead anywhere useful. It was more useful to read about the individual characters and to gauge the mood of the screen tests themselves, and, of course, a lot of the sounds we use could come out of the mid-60s anyway."
The "what would Warhol want?" question is an interesting one, though, surely. "Well, he famously used to tell people 'just do whatever's easiest', so he could have had people read from the phone book. So, no, we didn't follow that advice.
"It's hard to tell what music he liked, anyway. Opera? I guess he liked rock 'n' roll. He must have liked Duran Duran later on, because they were young and pretty and wore make-up.
"I have a very high opinion of him personally, and I just wonder how music history would have progressed had he not hooked up with the Velvet Underground. It's hard to imagine David Bowie being David Bowie, or the whole punk movement happening."
Wareham (who has just published a musical memoir entitled Black Postcards in the US) says the British premiere is happening in Dunfermline at the venue's request. He's interested to hear, though, that Dunfermline's Carnegie Hall and the one in New York are both named after the same Andrew Carnegie. "And the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is also owned by the Carnegie Institute," he points out. "It's all connected."
• 13 Most Beautiful… Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests with Dean and Britta is at the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, tonight. Tel: 01383 602302
