When I was a kid I didn’t much care for the taste of broccoli, or prawns. I remember my mother taking me across the street one day to visit Mr and Mrs Moody, where old Fred was proudly handing out freshly caught and cooked prawns. I put one in my mouth and instantaneously felt like I’d just started to munch on the worst kind of sickly tasting, rubbery textured vile creature I could imagine.

Being the well-mannered and polite kid I was, I pretended to have chewed it up and swallowed it, while it remained in my mouth for what seemed like an hour but was maybe a still torturous ten or fifteen minutes. I can’t believe that the adults didn’t realise I was concealing this disgusting thing in my mouth, not saying a word for the duration of our stay. I spat the half-masticated mess into the gutter the moment we were back across the street to our house, not wanting Fred to know that I was so repulsed by what he was so clearly proud of having dragged from the bottom of the lake. I can’t remember many trips back to the Moodys’ house after that. I did eventually manage to tolerate the taste of them, but now choose to eschew them from my culinary needs for reasons other than their historical bad juju.

The Dandy Warhols kind of remind me of my childhood crustacean calamity, in that when I first encountered them they had the same affect of making me slightly nauseous and their music (or perhaps more so them) difficult to swallow. Like the prawn, this was based on one quick sample, but it was enough to put me off going back for another bite for quite a while. Somewhere along the way they became more palatable and eventually became a taste that I was happy to acquire. I delved into their catalogue and found a band that wasn’t just a sugary hit, but one with songwriting smarts and a predilection for catchy hooks that a trawler captain would be envious of.

Watching the documentary Dig came with a warning similar to the one I’m passing onto you now; “you may end up hating them after it”. Well, not so much the Dandys, but the film’s co-subjects and musical cohorts The Brian Jonestown Massacre, more precisely their singer and chief songwriter Anton Newcombe. The drama and tension between what are essentially two groups of friends in two different bands, both on a similar path but handling the pitfalls along the way in quite different manners can be difficult to watch, but it’s also hard to stop, no matter how much you tell yourself that the histrionics aren’t going to subside any time soon.

It’s obvious that TBJM and Anton were (are) the more talented songwriters, if not musicians, and the fact that the Dandys’ more commercially-viable pop songs were receiving the mainstream media and record company attention really tore TBJM and particularly Anton’s heart out. His downward path of destruction is at once both sad and almost laughable, such is the pettiness of some of his methods of dealing with living in the shadow of people he cannot deny as friends but whom he believes to be inferior in their shared artistic field.

It’s also quite sobering to realise how long both of these bands have been around, and that they are still going today. TBJM toured New Zealand at the end of last year and the Dandys have a new album which came out around the same time. Musically, artistically and creatively, I think Anton has probably fared the better, continually producing music that shows he is truly a great songwriter, while Courtney and Co prove that good pop tunes are a timeless commodity if done well, which they do. Anton seems to have gotten his personal shit together, but there’s a definite toll from his years of excess. How couldn’t there be?

But fuck me, how the hell a guy like Joel Gion can ride the coattails of proper musicians for so long just by bashing a fucking tambourine and making no apparent contribution besides being a drug-fucked cretin with fantastic sunglasses is beyond me, but kudos to him for pulling it off. That’s some kind of genius in itself.

Dig can be a hard watch, especially for those not into either band’s music, but it’s also hard to look away once you’re in. It’s sometimes more a psychological study than a rock ‘n roll film, and you’ll find yourself analysing the characters and their interactions with each other, and how each band handles their respective fame or failure to gain it has far wider reaching implications, which still affect both bands today.

P.S. I love broccoli now. Prawns I can do without.