Courtney Taylor-Taylor, singer, guitarist, songwriter

A car pulled up outside my flat in Portland, Oregon. Before the Dandy Warhols signed to EMI, I was a mechanic, so I knew the vehicle: a 1980-81 BMW 320i with a primer quarter panel, the ubiquitous affordable BMW. The driver was this super-cool-looking woman with bleached hair piled up with black roots and a shirt worn over a pink top. The lights changed and off she went, just as I’d started thinking that if the car stalled, I could go down and say: “Hey, I can fix that.” Instead, I cranked out Bohemian Like You in around five minutes.

The guitar part came first, a ham-fisted imitation of the Rolling Stones: a classic caveman blues-rock riff to hammer on. The lyrics and the title summed up the girl – her tattoos, the car – and the way the Dandys dressed then, straight out of secondhand thrift stores. My mum called us hipsters, but “bohemian like you” sounded better than “hipster like you”.

I’ve always had recording equipment at my fingertips so was able to record the basics there and then. When we recorded it properly, I played the jungle drums in the middle but when we mixed it we chopped them over to the intro, and when they cut into Fathead’s drum fill it sounds like the same drummer.

When Bohemian was released, it was our lowest charting single. Then Vodafone put it in an advert, featuring a girl in short shorts and a bikini top at a festival. It was a great piece of film that captured the era. That advert was shown everywhere and the song just connected hugely. It was a cultural turning point. After Bohemian, the Strokes and the White Stripes emerged and suddenly everyone wanted the “new-old” sound: vintage guitars and amps with vocal harmonies.

I think we’d have been buried by the label had Bohemian not been so huge, but [after its success] they probably thought: “Maybe these guys know what they’re doing after all.”

The first time I heard the song in public, I’d taken a CD of the finished mix to the Sway bar in New York, which was packed with the celebs of the day: Liv Tyler, Jude Law and so on. I knew the DJ and when he put the CD on people crowded on to the dancefloor. When the guitar riff came in there was this little roar, then people who’d never heard the song were pumping fists and singing the “Ooh ooh ooh”. I saw my future right there. I was sitting there thinking: “Whoah.”

Brent ‘Fathead’ DeBoer, drums

The Dandys’ initial drummer [Eric Hedford] had just quit, so Courtney – who’s my cousin – asked me to come over. He’d been up all night but he managed to croak three sentences in an hour, including: “You’re the only person who knows all the songs, who can drum and sing.”

I first heard Courtney’s demo of Bohemian on a cassette on our tour bus in Holland, but we didn’t give that song any more credence than the others until we came to record it. I remember Courtney bashing out the riff, and Pete [Holmström, guitarist] and I glanced across at each other and I thought: “Wow, I’m going to play on a hit record.”

It was the wildest recording session we ever had. We rented this big stone gymnasium in Portland and turned it into this insane psychedelic setting with friends playing strip poker, a fridge full of beers and all the other things you can imagine. We had a heater that shot jets of fire. There was carbon monoxide coming through from the garage underneath and people were running around, wrestling and diving on top of each other.

The vast space gave us a great, vintage sound but our poor engineer, Greg Williams, worked so hard he ended up in pain. We ordered a professional massage for him. I remember Courtney walking in and going: “What the?!” Zia [McCabe, keyboards] and one of her friends were piled up on the table getting a massage, and people were walking up, saying to the masseur: “Man, I’ve smoked so much pot that my back’s sore. Can I have a rub?”

Before Bohemian, nobody ever came backstage, but after it went Top 5 in all these different countries, all the coolest bands with “the” in their name were hanging out with us.

• The Dandy Warhols’ new album, Why You So Crazy, is released on 25 January on Dine Alone. The band’s 25th anniversary tour starts in the UK at the 02 Institute, Birmingham, on 29 January.