CLICK HERE TO GO TO WFMU: http://freemusicarchive.org/curator/WFMU/blog/Fall_in_Love_Again_with_Dean__Britta

Dean and Britta from The Little Squares on Vimeo.

Dean and Britta, a film by The Little Squares directed by Debra Scherer captures an intimate moment with the musical duo, with Dean Wareham narrating.

13 MB is now available for digital download on our webstore as well as iTunes, Amazon, etc…

Order the CD from our website and receive a free 11″ x 17″ poster

MORE “Dean Wareham plays Galaxie 500″ shows added!

Nov. 15 - Vancouver, BC
Nov. 16 - Seattle, WA
Dec. 10-12 - ATP’s Bowlie Festival 2
Butlins, Minehead, Somerset UK
(exact date TBC - either Friday or Saturday)

ALL tour dates: www.deanandbritta.com/shows

We are opening for Charlotte Gainsbourg next Tuesday at the Bell House, but it is already sold out, I’m afraid. http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/12/charlotte_gains.html

Interview with Dean in Perth Now: http://www.perthnow.com.au/entertainment/famous-faces/story-e6frg3gl-1225817425111

Interview with Dean for Womadelaide Festival: http://www.departmentforsound.com/2010/01/11/womadelaide-2010-dean-and-britta-interview/

Interview with Dino Stamatopoulos about new Adult Swim show: “Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole”

Nice little blurb about My Robot Friends song, “By Your Side,” which Dean plays on.

Source: The Sunday Times

Ask A Straight Couple: Dean & Britta

http://thenewgay.net/2009/06/dean-britta.html

After performing this Andy Warhol Screen Test show in museums across the country for the past six months, the DVD from Plexifilm has finally arrived and is a thing of beauty. The DVD is housed in an elegant hardcover booklet with with forty pages of notes and photographs. It contains the original Andy Warhol films, with our songs (brand new studio recordings) as the soundtrack, along with a short documentary about the making of the live show. The DVD officially hits the streets April 7, but we have copies available now.

We are playing our last 13 Most Beautiful show for a while, this Saturday night at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, but will pick up again July 2 with a show at the Ann Arbor Arts Festival, followed by July shows in Marseille, Dunfermline (Scotland), St Etienne and Paris.

Here is the official description of the DVD from the Plexifilm site:

Released in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Museum, 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests features 13 of Warhol’s classic silent film portraits. Subjects include Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, and more. Shot between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol’s Factory studio in New York City, the Screen Tests are presented with newly commissioned soundtracks performed by Dean & Britta (and band).
This is the first ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol.

The DVD is presented in a slipcovered hardbound package. DVD extras include a behind-the-scenes documentary on the live production of the 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Testsperformances, and a video interview with Dean & Britta about Andy Warhol, the music and the project. The booklet includes brief biographies of the Screen Test subjects, liner notes from the Warhol Museum’s Thomas Sokolowski, Geralyn Huxley, and Ben Harrison and notes on the music from Dean Wareham.

13 Most Beautiful: Songs for
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
13 “Screen Test” portrait films
by Andy Warhol, with songs
performed by Dean & Britta

DVD (Region 0 - World)
$30
BUY NOW

thanks,

Dean

Image by Joel Olliphint

Dean & Britta bring Warhol to life in Chicago
March 7, 2009, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater

By Genevieve Diesing
Published: March 11th, 2009 | 2:35pm

When the Andy Warhol Museum sought a way to give new relevance to Warhol’s works decades after their first splash, it commissioned the “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,” a performance tour of Warhol’s four-minute, black and white silent portraits of 1960s art scene celebrities, accompanied by  husband-and-wife team Dean & Britta’s original songs and covers. It’s a landmark idea, and art curators across the country must be slapping their foreheads for not thinking of it first.

The tour sold out one of two performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater Saturday night, and the majority of the room was occupied by Chicago’s artsy-set. The polite crowd filled the airy, sterile room’s steep stadium seats. Businesslike ticket-takers flanked the doors, handing back ticket stubs with a curt “75 minutes no intermission!” No one really knew what to expect.

All eyes were on the stage by about 8 p.m., when an enormous image of a face appeared onscreen. It stared evenly back at viewers, barely moving, and the camera slowly zeroed in. In the middle of this, Dean & Britta stepped out.

The dream pop duo and their band, dwarfed by the images above them, started with a slow transition into playing guitar and keyboards. Each song lasted about four minutes, and the screen’s faces, all in the same inescapable position before the camera, conveyed an emotional presence that made it hard to believe they weren’t really there, also listening.

One of the first subjects, Paul Johnson – aka  “ Paul America” was all smirks and contagious smiles, and the expressions that so visibly fluttered across his face seemed in direct response to the playful, high-energy melody that serenaded him. “Later (in his life), he’d protect Edie Sedgwick from people who were trying to rip her off,” Dean Wareham explained, before proceeding to share anecdotes about nearly every subject that crossed the screen.

The famed Ms. Sedgwick was next, with an unwavering stare that hovered between stricken and pleased. She evoked the kind of intensity in just four minutes that Sienna Miller couldn’t capture in a whole two hours of the 2006 Sedgwick biopic “Factory Girl.”  Dean & Britta accompanied her with ethereal, yearning melodies, which managed to deepen Sedgwick’s impossible lifelikeness.

When Nico’s tape began to roll, Britta Phillips exchanged her electric guitar for a tambourine to cover Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” a tune the singer had written for Nico in 1965. Britta’s beautiful soprano added a certain compassion to the song. As Nico gazed contemplatively past the camera with her finger resting in her mouth, Britta’s delivery of lines such as “Everybody will help you discover what you set out to find,” was touching. The combination of the song, Nico’s film and Britta’s delivery might have very well revealed to strangers the Nico that Bob Dylan saw. This tangible empathy might also have to do with the fact that Nico was a mainstay of the Velvet Underground, a group Dean & Britta have citied as their biggest influence.

The mood changed with each subject; Dean & Britta plunged into psychedelic guitar riffs as a young Dennis Hopper scintillated onscreen. Darker, swinging melodies accompanied a handsome, rugged young man as he continually swigged from a bottle of Coca Cola.

The songs played on in a meandering, anticlimactic way, in keeping with the elusive quality consistent in almost all of Warhol’s work. Suggestive, striking and answerless – Warhol’s transfixing silent films have achieved the ultimate triumph in this collaborative performance by giving their subjects such evocative and unending life. And Dean & Britta’s masterful composition, arrangement and performance couldn’t have provided a sweeter landscape
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For more photos from this show visit Venus Zine’s Flickr page.
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Dean & Britta feature
Review of Dean and Britta’s Back Numbers

Catching Up With… Dean Wareham
By Aaron Jentzen
on March 9, 2009 3:30 PM

When the Andy Warhol Museum decided to commission a live soundtrack to accompany Warhol’s silent film portraits, known as “screen tests,” they called up old friends Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. The duo was a natural sonic choice: From their early years in the band Luna (and Wareham in Galaxie 500), up through their current incarnation as Dean & Britta, their music has often carried traces of the trademark tonalities of Warhol’s Factory house band, The Velvet Underground.

The resulting work, 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, features a four-piece band performing in front of a large screen, accompanying 13 short films Warhol shot from 1964-1966. Many of the songs were composed expressly for the films, while others come from Dean & Britta’s large back catalog. A few are well-chosen covers, such as pairing Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep it with Mine” with Nico’s screen test—a song the German chanteuse covered on her debut solo album, Chelsea Girl.

Dean & Britta took the unique show on the road to a handful of theaters, beginning with New York’s Allen Room on Jan. 17. On March 24, Plexifilm will release a DVD, with the films set to studio versions of the songs. Paste attended the stunning world premiere at Pittsburgh’s Byham Theater, part of the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, and talked with Wareham about the project over coffee the next day.

Paste: How did 13 Most Beautiful get started?

Dean Wareham: I got called by [curator of performance] Ben Harrison at the Warhol Museum. I guess they’ve been sitting on these, hundreds of these screen tests, and they’re not often seen. Sometimes they loan them out to an art gallery and project them on the walls. But they’re certainly not seen like this. I couldn’t have imagined when I was a kid that I would get this job. It’s weird to be working on this Andy Warhol project; it’s kind of daunting.

Paste: Did you choose which films to use?

Wareham:Yeah, that was our decision. I made a few trips down to Pittsburgh and sat at the museum looking at tapes. Initially, we were thinking of doing it as “13 Most Beautiful Women,” or “13 Most Beautiful Girls.” Warhol sometimes showed them as “13 Most Beautiful Girls,” “13 Most Beautiful Boys.” But I read a whole bunch of memoirs of life at the Factory, and sort of became more and more interested in the characters that were there, that were central. People that were there every day: Billy Name, or Ingrid Superstar.

Paste: You do hone in on the most central, recognizable figures. What else were you looking for while selecting the films?

Wareham: Just looking for something interesting to happen, or some of them would just be beautiful. I guess one of the more striking ones is the Ann Buchanan one, the second one — this was one of Warhol’s favorite screen tests. Early on, he would tell people, “Look, just stare straight at the camera; don’t do anything,” and I think as the years went by, he loosened that and people started doing stuff. But she looks straight ahead, unblinking, for three minutes, and then finally that one tear rolls down. And there’s a tiny smile at the end, which is cool.

That happens in a lot of them: The subject comes in and they try to project one thing, and they can do it for about two minutes. So Dennis Hopper is like, “I’m real serious, and I’m reliving some awful sadness from my past.” And he can keep that up for two minutes and then he cracks! I don’t know what happened off camera, but he smiles. So I think there’s a psychological thing that happens to anyone having to sit there and maintain a pose for three minutes; it’s a challenge, and you see two different people sometimes.

Paste: Edie Sedgwick’s really jumps off the screen.

Wareham: That song, “It Don’t Rain in Beverly Hills,” was written by a couple of friends of ours…it seemed to somehow be about her. I know obviously it wasn’t, but it’s about the sadness of her story. It seems to be about someone who goes out to Beverly Hills and tries to be an actor—which isn’t quite [Sedgwick’s] life—and finding that it’s not all that.

So many of these people, of the 13, five of them are dead, likely some of them drug-related. Freddie Herko, he’s the guy who is smoking and just looking real gaunt, he committed suicide a month later. Well, I’m not sure if “suicide” is the right word: He invited some people over, and danced out the window of his fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Cornelia Street. Not having been there, I don’t know if that’s suicide, or if he was on speed. He certainly looks like he’s been up for days in that screen test.

Paste: Have you interacted with any of these folks?

Wareham: I’m hoping to meet some; maybe some of them will come to the show in New York. Lou Reed—Lou, I know. I met all of the Velvet Underground except Nico, so Lou’s the only one I know [of the 13]. Jane Holzer, I have a friend who knows her.

Paste: And Warhol?

Wareham: No. Saw him across a room once, but that’s it.

Paste: I would imagine it was fairly daunting to choose music for Reed’s screen test; he provided the original soundtrack for the Factory scene in some ways.

Wareham: I know. What can you do with Lou Reed? We were looking at two screen tests. There’s another one of him without the shades where he looks like a sweet little boy. But then you put the shades on and he looks like a rock ’n’ roll motherfucker. Ultimately, we decided to do this recently discovered Velvet Underground song, “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” which just seems kinda perfect, because he’s so young in that video. So initially with him, we were nervous about doing anything remotely sounding like the Velvet Underground, but it feels right with the Factory.

Paste: Some motifs you use are similar to the Velvets: drones that build up, songs with static chord progressions.

Wareham: There’s no right or wrong answer for any of what we do, I suppose. …And then the more you read about Warhol, he would have just said, “Just do whatever’s easiest.” He was fond of saying that. Make up 13 songs, or just play one for the whole thing. Actually, I think we worked harder on it than he would have!

Paste: A couple of the screen tests have prominent props—like Reed’s hilarious gesturing with a Coke bottle.

Wareham: I don’t know what they were hoping to achieve with that, the Coke. There’s another one with Hershey, maybe Nico with a Hershey bar as well. Maybe they were trying to get an endorsement. The Velvet Underground ones were shot expressly to be projected on them as they played, at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which is why theirs are generally kind of different.

Paste: Since you mention the EPI, music and film together is a very Warholian idea. With these screen tests, do you feel that they’re about celebrity and about fame, or do they end up being about people?

Wareham: Maybe if they’re famous people, then they’re about celebrity. You can’t help but look at Dennis Hopper and have it be about celebrity. I think this grew out of [Warhol’s] portraits, obviously; he’s doing a similar thing to what he was doing with the painting. Are they about celebrity? They call them “screen tests,” but they’re not screen tests, he wasn’t screen testing people for anything, I don’t think. Maybe that was a line for Gerard Malanga to get laid: “C’mon back, and Andy will shoot your screen test.”