When Bands Break Your Heart

It’s the realisation that the band you’ve stuck up for so vehemently, the band that you’ve believed in and pinned all your hopes and dreams on, the band that write songs about your life, you realise that they are nothing but a sell out like the rest of them.

It happens to them all, don’t trust your favourite band, don’t dare fall in love, because Burt Bacharach was right, the only thing you’ll get when you fall in love is, “A girl with a pin to burst your bubble/That's what you get for all your trouble”.

That bubble that bursts can be anything really, it can be the chance meeting of your idol, when you realise they’re actually a cunt. Even though for years, you’ve knew that they were a cunt, you just kept lying to yourself. You heard them on radio, you saw the interview on TV, but you still kept on going, you still kept believing in them, no matter how much of an arse they sounded, and no matter how much you didn’t agree with what they were saying. You stood by them through the addictions, through the relationship problems, no matter how many times they let you down, you’d still be there.

And all they ever do is build you up to let you back down again. They sing songs to you that you swear were written about your childhood, about your town, they croon about how your last relationship petered out. You defend them when your friends say they’re shit, you quote and post endlessly on Internet forums when somebody has the brass neck to say they didn’t like their new album.

You turn obsessive, bidding endlessly on cardboard cutouts that some eBay entrepreneur found, whilst rummaging through the skip at the back of HMV. You buy the German, Australian and Japanese versions of the new single, just to get the extra B-sides and live tracks. You enthuse about them wildly at parties and gigs, not being able to comprehend why nobody else is as passionate as you about them.

But Noel Gallagher was right, you know. “Please don’t put your lives in the hands of a rock and roll band, they’ll throw it all away”, he sung in “Don’t Look Back In Anger”. But even when you hear Noel saying that, he becomes just like you and you move on from your broken heart, because you’ve found an affinity with another rockstar, who is just as hurt and vulnerable as you are, and the cycle begins again.

Everything is just there to suck you in, to make you buy more records, to make you buy every version of every single, to make you buy the vinyl twice, once in black and once on limited edition pink vinyl. They’re using you, cheating on you. And then comes the ultimate, just when your clinging onto the romance by a tiny thread, they go and put their songs on an advert, they sign to a major label, they start going to celebrity parties. It’s the final nail in the coffin of your relationship.

You go to work the next day, and the band that you held so dear, the band that you thought nobody else knew about, the band that you’d discovered long before they were on the radio or in the NME, suddenly, they belong to everyone. Suddenly the fat bastard at the coffee machine is humming the tune from the advert, suddenly everybody wants to go and see them live, suddenly the person with no taste that you hate is in love with the lead singer, the twat who knows nothing about music tries to dress the same way as them. You should be happy for the band, but in a selfish and jealous way, it’s eating your insides up. You’ve lost everything; it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

Inevitably you still hold a torch for them, you try to convince yourself that they mean nothing to you, but as much as you join in with your friends in slagging them off, you still remember the good times that you had, and the memories that come back every time you hear that song on their first album.

Whether it's a band you love, whether it's your heroes, Burt was definitely on the money.

“What do you get when you fall in love?
You only get lies and pain and sorrow
So for at least until tomorrow
I'll never fall in love again”.