POP history may be littered with great battles of the bands — Beatles v Stones, Oasis v Blur, Coldplay v Crazy Frog — but you really know you’re in a titanic struggle when one of your rivals sends you a packet filled with shotgun shells that have your bandmates’ names on them.

This is just one of the many moments of insanity that occurred during the feud between two West Coast indie rock groups, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and captured by the film-maker Ondi Timoner in her documentary Dig!, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

Timoner spent seven years filming the two bands as their fortunes rose and fell, capturing them at their worst, most drug-addled and most psychotic. At some points, Dig! is practically a primer on how not to win friends and influence people in the music buisiness: Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe picking fights with his band onstage during a performance for a major label; the Dandy Warhols’ lead singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor staging a photo shoot at the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s house without telling them.

No one emerges from the film unscathed, and you imagine that most of the participants would cringe at the very thought of the movie. Yet the Dandy Warhols are surprisingly OK about it. They disagree with the film’s focus and would like to take back some of the things said in it, but Timoner remains friends with the band.

“I’m so glad she took the time to document a good part of an important part of my life,” says Zia McCabe, the group’s keyboards player. “She was a lot of fun and so dedicated. She did it for no money. She would have to get other gigs from Capitol ’s American record label to afford going on the road with us, which is pretty dedicated.

“You get to see what it’s like to be in a band. There’s so much mystery about what it’s like to be a musician, and I think the movie lifts the curtain up just a peek.”

On the surface, the Dandy Warhols remain “on message” about the film, and the impression you get is the one espoused by Dig! — that they are a happy, well-adjusted band of careerists. They are, as the guitarist Peter Holmstrom says in the film, the lucky band that manages to avoid getting busted for drugs in Europe while Brian Jonestown has a couple of members thrown in jail in the US when it wasn’t even their stash (according to a statement on the band’s website, at least).

Scratch a bit longer at the scab left by the film, though, and a slightly different picture emerges. “I don’t agree with the way any of it was painted, really,” says Taylor-Taylor.

“Ondi’s a film-maker, she makes movies and she needs to make money and have a job doing it and that’s fine — ‘Yeah, Anton at his worst, yeah, get that on film.’ That’s the kind of films she makes, though, you know, like docu- drama. Sweet and insightful and subtle are not parts of her film-making repertoire as far as I can tell.

“I love Ondi, but I don’t like the fact that her movies seem only to relate to misery and pain.”

In fact, it was most probably the band’s close relationship with Timoner and her crew that made the film turn out the way it did. While they resented having to repeat things several times or stage events for the camera, none of the band members resented her presence.

“I spouted stuff I really regret because I wasn’t talking to the camera, I was talking to a friend,” says Holmstrom.

“A lot of what got recorded, people don’t talk like that, it’s not real,” adds Taylor-Taylor. “I’ve spent my life trying to understand about how to be a good musician, not how to be a personality.”

But Dig!’s premier personality, intentionally or not, is Newcombe. The mainstay of the Brian Jonestown Massacre is presented as a paranoid, self-destructive, jealous musical genius incapable of surviving in the real world.

“I think Anton probably is a genius,” says Taylor-Taylor. “He recognises patterns, he understands motivations, he understands the outcomes of social interactions, but he’s just a loose gun.”

The rivalry between the two groups, who began the film as friends, was sparked by Newcombe as a way of getting press attention. But he neglected to tell the Dandy Warhols that that was his intention, and matters grew so out of control that the Dandy Warhols’ manager got a restraining order issued against him. But despite his antics — the shotgun shells among them — Holmstrom still wears a Brian Jonestown Massacre badge on his jacket and none of the Warhols has a bad word to say about him.

“I just got off the phone with him about an hour ago,” Taylor-Taylor claims. “We’re better friends now, for sure. We both regret the way the movie went, but it’s a good movie. I was surprised that she was able to get a real movie out of it — I know we have had a beautiful learning experience as artists and people through this whole thing.”

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