Pete Wentz: ‘We felt underappreciated by some of the fans’

Hi Pete! The reformed Fall Out Boy have just announced two shows at Wembley Arena in October – is this the age-old trick of pretending to split up for three years until people start caring again?

The truth is, when the break happened (1) – I can only speak for myself personally – but I didn’t want to go on a break. I was not interested. It was really hard for me and I went through a hard time in my own life. To me it was potentially a break-up where maybe you get back together. But I can’t think of that many bands off the top of my head that broke up, took time off and then came back and played new material that was played on the radio. That was the real trick that we attempted.

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Why did you split?

There were so many little things, little moments. We put out a strange record (2) and we weren’t really talking to each other at that point. There were too many interviews about my personal life that were getting in the way of everything. The communication just broke down. Everyone goes through patches but if you don’t talk about it, it can become really malignant. We felt underappreciated by some of the fans. Life ebbs and flows, and that’s how it is for bands too. Fall Out Boy is like a big chaotic machine. We play around the world and we’re constantly jetlagged. We went through 12 or 14 years of just non-stop, not having time to process what we’re going through. But I think that in taking time out we realised that those other three people are the only other people who experienced that, and it’s like a band of brothers. We fight like siblings, literally.

You were having prescription drug problems too…

That got blown out of proportion. I said it in an interview with Rolling Stone and then it spun into this thing like “Oh, Pete’s gonna go to rehab!” but it was never that kind of thing. I had severe anxiety at the time, and so it would involve drinking before I went on stage. I got really clumsy – it was not a pretty thing. But that was literally a couple of months. I guess the pill thing existed but it never got so out of hand to the point where somebody had a conversation with me where I didn’t do my job or wasn’t there for friends. It was a thing that I stopped when I had kids.

You said you felt despised at the time, why?

People were reviewing our records and shows based on what they thought of me personally. You are who you are in your head. And then there’s this other perspective of you that the media and maybe people that read the media have. You’re probably somewhere in between but I found that when I would meet people it felt like I started so far in the red that I had to work so hard to get myself back to “Oh, he’s a decent guy”. It felt like there was an opinion of me before I‘d even interacted with anybody. A character of who you are gets created and it’s very easy to write it off like “Oh, this guy’s a douchebag”, because he does douchebag things. When you’re in your 20s, if someone gives you the keys to the castle and says “You won’t get in any trouble”, it’s hard to not run around and see what that entails. But at some point I got that out of my system; I think a lot earlier than I was given credit for.

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FOB bassist Andy Hurley said the break made you a million times better as a person - how?

The only thing that really happened to me during the break was that my personal life kind of fell apart (3) and I got that back in order. I went to therapy, took my kid to preschool every day and went to my local coffee place just like a regular adult human being, and I think that probably gives you some perspective. I think that having my kid and being a dad was the best experience for me, I think that I now have more empathy. I’m a better listener and a more patient person. I also know that I can be a very hard person to be around sometimes, so when I’m feeling like I’m being a maniac I’ll just go to my hotel room rather than be around people. Everyone has ups and downs, terrible outfits and bad haircuts, says stupid things and whatever, but it’s weird when you do it in the public eye because everyone knows about it. It creates a strange paranoia.

During the break you also presented Best Ink – a kind of America’s Next Top Tattooist reality show – and wrote a novel called Gray. Was this your chance to finally take centre stage?

Best Ink was a lot of fun to do. Even though I’m a person who’s a tattoo enthusiast, actually learning about the art and about line weights, colour saturation and greyscale was really cool. It was an education from true masters in the field. With Gray, I wrote this fictional piece many years ago, and when I got divorced I was looking through my old stuff and thought maybe I’ll put it together and put it out. It took about six years to get it done; at the time when I wrote it, it didn’t have any linear thoughts at all. So I turned it into this band growing up and breaking up, then all of a sudden people are like “Oh this is like an autobiography!”. And I’m, like, no, the autobiography if it ever happens will be so much stranger! I don’t know if I’d ever write another book. I thought it was going to be similar to writing songs but it wasn’t. It gave me a new respect for writers and authors. It wasn’t a process I particularly enjoyed.

You’ve famously been known as the bassist who most upstaged his singer, but when you reformed FOB, vocalist Patrick Stump had become something of a surprise sex god. Was it strange to suddenly not be the de facto frontman?

I do the same thing in the band that I’ve done before and Patrick does the same thing he did before. He lost some weight which is great for his confidence, but other than that he just wanders round stage a little bit more. He’s always been a great frontman, he just never saw it that way. When I think about the Rolling Stones sometimes I think about Mick Jagger but sometimes I think about Keith Richards. Different days for different parts of the body.

Your new record American Beauty/American Psycho is awash with all-out mainstream electro-pop moments – are you officially Fall Out Boyband now?

I can see how people would see it like that, but when we put out Sugar We’re Going Down, Dance Dance and Thnks Fr Th Mmrs those we’re all pop Radio 1 A-lists, TRL, MTV. It’s just never been a thing that was scary to us. You go away for four years and your sound does have to adapt. I feel like if you’re going to be an influencer of pop culture you have to play it on pop radio. We’re trying to be that band.

As one of the earliest high profile dick-pic cases (4), did you think the nude photo hacking scandal was tantamount to sexual abuse?

I think that any time you go into someone else’s private area, and you take something from that, it’s theft. I don’t know how you define it as far as what kind of crime it is, but it seems like there should be certain human decency that we share. You have to understand that celebrities are still human beings. You still have to treat people with the barest human decency. You don’t have to love somebody, you don’t even have to like somebody, but hacking into their phone and taking pictures of theirs is just ridiculous. People don’t think there’s a human being attached to it. I had so many reactions to the point of “You leaked photos of yourself”. How would that in any way benefit my life or make me feel better about myself? It was just insane to me. And then there was a point where I thought, if these are the terms that we do this band on, I don’t want to do this band. I felt like my privacy had been invaded. But I’m a big boy, I have thick skin, and that is on such a small level compared to what happened last year. It’s pretty terrible.

Despite the humiliation, you’ve gone on to build an empire including a film-production company, a record label, a clothing line, a chain of Angels & Kings bars and various charity projects – are you the punk rock Jay Z?

There’s literally only one Jay Z. He’s one of a kind. What I’ve tried to do is approach the world with the idea that we have to create a community or a culture, and sometimes that’ll be a club that comes out of a bar, or a clothing range. Sometimes it’s rallying people towards charitable ideas. It’s all kind of seamless to me. Jay Z? I think he just figured out the formula earlier, or the best version of it.

In your book The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, detailing your childhood nightmares, what was the worst?

The worst nightmare was about this doctor that had tentacles. The tentacles would come under the door. (5)

Footnotes

(1) Fall Out Boy went on a vague hiatus in 2010, which Wentz preferred to describe as the highly-strung band “decompressing”.

(2) 2008’s Folie a Deux sold a million copies, but was so poorly received by some fans that FOB were booed when they played songs from it live.

(3) Pete’s high profile marriage to Ashlee Simpson broke down in 2011, Simpson claiming they “married too young”; the couple have one son, Bronx Mowgli.

(4) In 2006 a selfie of Wentz’s penis leaked online in what became known as Peengate.

(5) According to dreamoods.com, tentacles in dreams represent clingy relationships, doctors signify a need for spiritual healing and closed doors are a symbol of opportunities being denied to you. Note: this may all be total rubbish.