ERASERHEADS frontman Ely Buendia stirred up a hornet’s nest of Gen X/millennial angst when statements he made on a podcast regarding his relationship with the rest of the E-heads quickly went viral.
It’s no secret that the relationship between the Eraserheads has never been warm and fuzzy, even in the height of their career in the nineties. The group that’s been called at times as the Beatles of the Philippines perhaps didn’t have as fractious a relationship as Lennon and McCartney had inside the Fab Four, but their bond was mostly a professional, musical one.
“We’ve grown… apart from each other,” Buendia once told Esquire’s Erwin Romulo for the cover story of their September 2014 issue. “We all recognized the fact that there was just no growing any more within that setup.”
At the time, Romulo had accompanied the Eraserheads in their reunion concert in London. At one point in their conversation, Romulo asked if the four were still friends.
“Of course we are,” the frontman said. “I think we’ve handled all that animosity or the bad blood better than any other band that you can actually name.”
He went on, “But yes, we are friends [now]. You cannot play music if you’re not friends. I don’t like the feeling of playing with somebody whom I despise. [...] To play the way you play, you have to be friends.”
That was seven years ago.
In a recent podcast guesting with wife-and-husband team Saab Magalona and Jim Bacarro, Buendia once again circled the topic of the band’s relationship with one another as he discussed one of their biggest hits, “Minsan.”
You know that song, the one that starts with “Minsan sa may Kalayaan tayo'y nagkatagpuan…” referring to the University of the Philippines dorm where the quartet first met when they were freshmen.
“It’s not a specific line but the whole sentimentality of it [that's] cringey…” Buendia said to Magalona and Baccaro. “I was kinda sick of fans saying na ‘you’re friends. You shouldn’t have broken up.’ They made us feel bad about it.”
Buendia revealed that “Minsan” was actually about another set of friends, and not actually about the E-heads.
He then said, “I don’t wanna break hearts again but we were never close. We were never friends. That’s why we broke up."
For many OPM fans, this confession opened up fresh wounds — and caused a social media storm. Within the Summit Media network, Spin.ph’s sister publications Spot.ph and Esquire Philippines syndicated a Reportr story on Buendia’s confession, which gathered, as of posting, more than 2,500 combined shares.
In a series of tweets posted today, Buendia commented briefly about the can of worms he'd opened on the internet.
"Big deal, still?" he asked. "Why hate on people who want to tell the truth? I didn’t ask to be interviewed, nanahimik na nga ko dito eh living a happy life kayo yung makulit about the eheads."
Buendia added, "The music is all that matters, have you forgotten about that, and who wrote most of it?"
He also talked about his bandmates in a follow-up tweet.
"If it helps, the other guys are best buds so you can follow them if you like that," he said, as he posted a picture of his "cat, not giving a sh*t."
Welcome to rock.
In other news, there's a friends reunion today, reminded Buendia, perhaps a joking reference to the currently airing Friends reunion on HBO Go.
Get more of the latest sports news & updates on SPIN.ph
