Pete Wentz

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After seven years on the road, Pete Wentz is ready for a holiday with his son...

We didn’t realise how curly your hair is – it’s actually like a ‘fro!
Oh, yeah. I need to flat-iron it. I used to flat-iron my hair the whole time – I was like, the king of the flat-iron. I needed one for every territory we went to because they all ran on different electricity.

Did you have a preferred brand?
I didn’t know the name of it, but I liked the super-thin Japanese one that I’m not technically allowed to buy because I don’t have a cosmetics licence, but I have a friend who’s a stylist who nicked one for me. he gave it to me and told me not to burn myself.

How did you like doing Idol last night? Did you talk to the Maddens about it?
Yeah, it was fun. I talked to Joel during the week and he was telling me that it was fun and easy to do, and that he liked Stan a lot, to look out for Stan.

 Stan does seem to be a favourite…
Yeah, there was a lot of stomping for Stan I think.

 You’ve got your Fall Out Boy greatest-hits album coming out – does that make you feel old?
Um, I’ve felt old since I was 28. I’m 30 now, I turned 30 this year and I have a kid, a mortgage, two dogs, a wife. And I sit in traffic in LA and I swore I’d never become my father, but I have become him.

Your dad’s a lawyer, right?
Yeah, my dad’s a lawyer. So I didn’t really become him, I guess.

So, you’re like the cool, rock n’ roll version of your dad…
The saddest part is, my dad is the more interesting conversationalist out of us. Definitely.

Why’s that?
You’ll never win an argument with him. No matter what you believe, even if you believe what he believes, he will still defeat you in an argument. He’s a Philadelphia lawyer and I’ve left the dinner table countless times, looking up things in the dictionary, swearing and telling him he was wrong – but I’ve never won an argument with him.

You and the band are about to go on hiatus, aren’t you?
Woah – careful about the ‘h’ word.

Sorry, taking a break.
Let’s call it a sabbatical. Such a nice word. You know, it’s like a holiday. Kind of like you’re just decompressing. This is a break from Fall Out Boy and it’s for the sake of Fall Out Boy. What people don’t understand, I think, is that if we don’t, we will implode. This band will implode, and it won’t be a hiatus, it will be our band breaking up.

Seven years of constantly recording, touring and doing promo must take its toll, huh?
Yeah, it’s weird. That, to be honest with you, more than anything else, ages you so much. When I look back at pictures of us, like I got a chance to do with the Greatest Hits, it’s like, oh man. Nothing ages you like the road. You’re going on a tour bus, to an airport lounge, to a plane, to a bus, to a venue, to a bus, to a radio station. It’s just neverending and it can become a haze, especially because venues all look the same, you know? Is this totally f***ing up your line of questioning?

No, no, we were just going to say maybe you could use this break to brush up on your debating skills.
Nah, I’ve given up on that. I have tattoos – I’m not looking to get into any public office of any kind. And I’ve learned quickly not to argue with my father.

You’ve been doing Band Hero promo too. Do you play video games yourself?
I do. I play a lot of Wii, I like it. I like the Wii Fit and I like playing tennis. I kinda like Tiger Woods golf on it as well, and I like Guitar Hero. And apparently I have a Band hero waiting for me when I get home but I’m not sure of that yet.

Yeah, these things never arrive when they say they will…
That goes for everything in life.

We read recently that you’re looking to move out of Hollywood, is that true?
Ah, there’s these bizarre reports that our house is up for sale, and I kinda was just like, ‘Well, let’s see what people say our house is worth!’. Because, you know, we didn’t put our house up for sale. I mean, we’ve thought about moving to a more family-friendly neighbourhood, for our son. And just about every day there’s about 20 cars at the bottom of my hill, so I think about the safety of that. And I would love to just be able to, like, live in the South of France and commute or whatever, but I don’t have the lifestyle that affords that. Though I think there’s the possibility that we might migrate this winter and go somewhere else for a little bit.

Going and hiding out must sound pretty attractive?
Yeah. I don’t know that we’re gonna hide – I think we’re gonna go just somewhere else. I just want my son to experience different places, and so I think at this age it’s a great time to do it, because at some point he’s gonna be in school and I don’t want to be moving him around from school to school.

Is it strange to think that his childhood is so different from your own?
Yeah, I mean, in some ways it’s weird because my parents, well, we lived in a staunchly conservative neighbourhood and my parents were very liberal. We were like the sole Democrats on a block of Republicans. And we travelled around the world and got to see a lot of different cultures. We went to Europe many times and to Mexico. And my parents always wanted us to be people of the world. So in that way, I think that Bronx and I have that similarity. The other good thing is that, I don’t know if this translates in Australia, but in the States there’s this sense of mid-western values. That’s where I grew up, and I think that being able to kind of instil those in Bronx is important to me. and also, it allows me to stay grounded and be like, ‘Well, this is not normal, so we’re going to make this as normal for you as possible’.

How do you do that?
You hang out in the backyard and build forts. Don’t let the world kill someone’s imagination, don’t let people take pictures of your kid all the time. There’s certain times when you’re like, ‘I do have to take him to the pumpkin patch, because it’s Halloween’, but I try to make sure those times are as minimal as possible. I don’t want him to grow up and think that this life is normal.

That sounds pretty healthy – it seems like a lot of people use their personal lives to get extra attention.
For me, that does nothing, because my band is my primary consideration. It’s what I eat, sleep and breathe. And people who follow my band don’t want to see me on blogs or whatever. So if anything, it’s negative for me, it’s attention that I don’t need.

Do you think it detracts from your music?
It detracts from people being able to look at my music from an objective point of view, and it detracts from people being able to understand it. I truly believe that Patrick [Stump, the band’s drummer/singer] is a musical genius, and people are distracted from being able to see that because they see this big cloud of attention on Pete Wentz, rather than the band.

The flipside of that would be that many more people have been exposed to FOB because of your–
–Overexposure.

Do you ever wish that you weren’t so much the frontman?
I do now. I think before I liked to just talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. I didn’t really care and I just wanted out band to be the biggest band on the planet and I would do anything to do it. I wanted to kick doors down. Now I think that our band has come into its own, I think it’s important to realise that we are a band, and there are three other members in the band and they all contribute.

Do you still have that drive to be number one?
Every band goes to sleep at night and wishes they were U2.

Really?
The bands that tell you that they’re not are lying to you.

That’s funny, ’cause Joel Madden said the exact opposite last week – that they’d never wanted to be number one!
All I’m saying is, and this is not to contradict Joel in any way whatsoever, because he’s a good friend of mine, I would say that if offered the option of ‘Behind door number one is the chance to go to sleep and wake up U2’, you’d take it. It’s not that you’d want to be the biggest band on the planet, but to feel like you’d somehow reached across the globe and it’s undeniable. People have heard of you, people have heard your songs, people recognise your songs and they might not even know the name of the band. You know, everyone has heard a U2 song. So I’m not talking about being the richest band, or the most famous, but being the band that has just absolutely dominated the globe. So I think if given that behind door number one, or what’s behind door number two and that’s not that, I think that most people would choose door number one.

What is it about bands that do get there? How do they do it?
Who would ever have imagined U2 would be playing stadiums back when they were doing tiny shows and playing punk-rock? I don’t think anyone would have picked that in a million years. And who’s the next U2? I don’t know. Who’s allowed into that boys’ club of superbands, though? I don’t know, maybe Coldplay’s allowed in. Maybe Radiohead.

If you had to choose between Coldplay and Radiohead to join that club who would you go for?
I think that Radiohead has probably put in more years and probably deserves it. But I think Radiohead could have written ‘Creep’ a thousand more times if they’d wanted to and I think they made a decision not to. You look at a band like Pearl Jam – I think Pearl Jam might be way more massive than they are now, but I think they made a conscious decision to be what they wanted to be and to stick with their loyal fanbase.

Do those kinds of decisions involve compromises?
Everything’s a compromise.