“I don’t wanna do an interview,” Courtney Taylor-Taylor announces. While I cower in the corridor, the individual twice nominated as the world’s most beautiful man by visitors to the mostbeautifulman.com website, brushes past me on his way out of the dressing room, his cheekbones slicing through the air. Mr So-Good-They-Named-Him-Twice is off to the pub.

In the wake of the lead singer’s departure, the tour manager looks beseechingly to the remaining members of the Dandy Warhols as they slump in their seats following the long soundcheck prior to their Olympia gig. Keyboard player Zia McCabe agrees to talk to me, but she’s not in particularly effusive form. Guitarist Peter Halstrom lounges, eyes closed, on the sofa, chipping in only with the odd smirk or drawled "yeah" or "no" here and there. They’ve really got looking bored down to a fine art. To be fair, the band are at the end of their tour, having just played two sold-out shows in London, so it’s little wonder they’re exhausted, especially considering their reputation as the ultimate party animals. As she sips her mineral water, Zia tells me that they’ve quietened down a bit.

"It’s less frequent, these days. We don’t take things to excess. All that stuff about drugs and orgies, though, that was just the British press getting their nut off on a band that was willing to talk about everything. We talked about everything and they just got a hard on about the drugs."

But you have done drugs, and written songs about them?

"Oh sure, but we do other stuff too. We are capable of having nice sober conversations. I don’t think we’ve taken anything to excess on this tour, except a lot of major rock ‘n’ roll."

The third album by the Portland band, Thirteen Tales Of Urban Bohemia was released last year, a hypnotic, melody-driven opus which constituted a slight departure from the wall-of-sound psych-pop explosion that was The Dandy Warhols Come Down, the album that propelled them into the spotlight with the notorious MTV-feted single ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’, and a video festooned with giant dancing syringes. The media embraced them as the epitome of hip, elegantly-wasted rock stars, cool and sophisticated yet entertainingly wild and uninhibited.

Zia was once noted for appearing naked at gigs. Do you still get your kit off?

"No, I stopped stripping onstage, I don’t do that anymore. (pause) Actually I never stripped onstage. Anything you’ve read in a previous article, forget it. We just get really excited about our music."

So are the Dandy’s performances these days more about tone and atmosphere, in keeping with the streamlined aesthetic of the last album?

"Well, there are less guitar tracks and harmonies on Thirteen Tales, and it is more melodic. It’s my favourite album of ours, actually. But each song has its own style and we play them all differently. We do a lot of noodling between songs as well.”

It’s the Dandy Warhols first ever Dublin show.

"The venue is great, it’ll be nice to have the people sitting on the balcony, just chilling out really close to us.

“We’ve got kinda weird fans. They do really funny stuff like making us little cards. Maybe anyone who gets so excited about one band is kinda weird, but I like ‘em. Most of the people I’d be a fan of are dead. But it was great meeting Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream. We only talked for about five minutes, but I felt like we became friends," Zia opines. She yawns and stretches, then her attention wanders as a girl with a video camera walks into the room.

Apparently, Courtney has been concentrating on film projects and the band have (secret) plans to collaborate with Massive Attack.

"We’ll start on a new Dandy Warhols album as soon as we get our home studio built in Portland. It’s really the way to go – renting a studio is so expensive, and there’s all this pressure for time and money. It’ll be easier when we can just go and do whatever, whenever the mood takes us.”

With that, the mood takes the rest of the Dandy Warhols to follow their leader down the pub. Anyone fancy a pint?