In the 2002 film About a Boy, based on the Nick Hornby novel of the same name, Hugh Grant’s character, Will, can’t seem to escape the memory of his dead father thanks to hearing the popular Christmas song his father wrote everywhere he goes. He lives off the royalties of the song, but hearing it as he strolls down a store’s aisles brings him misery rather than joy. Brothers Todd and Toby Pipes of Denton-born alt-rock band Deep Blue Something can relate, to a certain extent, but, unlike Will in the film, their version of that scenario is a rather pleasant one.
The band’s 1995 single “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the impossibly catchy tune featuring a man’s last-ditch attempt to save his troubled romance through a movie the couple “both kind of liked,” was an unlikely, yet inescapable, smash hit. The song shot to the Top 10 of the charts in a dozen countries, including No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America and No. 1 in the United Kingdom. Add to that, the song’s wonderfully ‘90s video, featuring Toby riding a horse on a sidewalk in Manhattan as the band eventually enjoyed a catered meal on the busy street in front of a certain prestigious jewelry store, seemed to play on VH1 and MTV multiple times an hour upon its release.
Still, all these years later, the song seems to be waiting for the Pipes brothers nearly everywhere they turn.
“I get at least one text message a day from someone who says they just heard it somewhere,” Toby, the band’s lead guitarist, says with a laugh over a video chat, where he’s joined by Todd. “But the best thing is when you’re at the dentist’s office and the Muzak version comes on. It’s actually pretty awesome.”
Todd, the lead singer and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” songwriter, also gets a kick out of the way his song has snuck up on him time and time again.
“Back when my kids played soccer,” Todd says, “I’d always have to go to Academy [Sports and Outdoors] to buy new shin guards because it seemed like someone was always losing one shin guard. I swear, every time I went in there, I heard it playing. Even to this day it still happens when I go there!”
‘Endless Bummer Tour’
When looking back on the era of high-riding success for the band, Todd and Toby Pipes fondly recall the global travel that took them to Austria, Germany, England, Sweden and beyond. But as glamorous as that sounds, for the band, it was often an emotionally challenging time.
Instead of zipping around, relishing an endless supply of commercial buzz and critical praise, the Pipes brothers, along with mates John Kirtland, Clay Bergus and Kirk Tatom, were often greeted by radio programmers and other industry types who were nonplussed by “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the band’s prospects in general.
“We called that time in Europe the Endless Bummer Tour,” Todd says. “Things didn’t happen for us all at once like you might expect to happen with a hit song. There wasn’t this big push by the record label or that type of promotion. It was city by city, state by state, country by country, with us being told, ‘We don’t think it’s going to happen for you guys.’”
Toby adds, “We kept hearing we sounded too British in America, and too American in Europe.”
The guys did get some encouragement from radio stations in Germany and Austria, and then finally, in England, radio stations began adding “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to their rotations. Todd still has a bit of edge to his voice when he talks about the stations that denied the band initially only to start playing the hit song when other stations in the same town added it to their playlists.
As it had in America, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” took over the U.K. As a result, the band performed on the storied Top of the Pops BBC television show in 1996. Before the taping, a record label rep who had previously told the band they would never be a success in England popped in to greet the group. As he presented the guys, who weren’t in any hurry to let him off the hook for his previous statements, with a fruit basket, of all things, the exec tried to ease the tension by asking, “Funny how things work out, isn’t it?”
“We kept thinking we were never going to make it, even when we were actually making it,” Todd says.
Although “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” had been huge, and the album that song was featured on, Home, achieved gold-record status in America, by 1998 the band found itself smacked with the “one-hit wonder” tag. Todd could sense a shift in the music industry.
The band’s record label, Interscope, had only released its 1998 album Byzantium overseas while turning its focus to the emerging rap-rock trend and bands such as Korn and Limp Bizkit. After wrangling its way out of its Interscope contract, the group released its self-titled album on indie Aezra Records in 2001 before splitting up.
Each of the band members had begun pursuing work outside of the group at that point. Both Pipes brothers were producing other artists, and there was a sense of peace about putting Deep Blue Something in the rearview.
“We had done everything we had set out to do,” Todd says. “We didn’t sell out or change who we were or chase fame or anything weird like that. It just felt like time to back away.”
‘Everyone knows the song’
Between 2001 and 2014, when the band reunited to record the Locust House EP, the guys stayed busy with their lives in and out of music. Todd and Toby each released albums from multiple projects, and notably, John Kirtland has operated Kirtland Records, home to North Texas greats Sarah Jaffe, the Toadies and more.
In 2010, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was featured in a Saturday Night Live sketch where actors Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis and Ryan Phillippe sang along to the song, highlighting its ubiquitous, memorable nature. The song has also landed on plenty of online lists of “one-hit wonders,” which might rub some artists the wrong way, but not Todd Pipes.
“I don’t think it’s a bad term, really,” Todd says. “I mean, you can get really technical and point out that ‘Halo’ was a Top 40 hit, but it really is fine. The great thing about ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is that it’s a hit that keeps going and going. Everyone knows the song. I guarantee you that you can go to Iceland, stop an old lady on the street and ask her to hum a few bars of the song, and she can. But will she know the name of our band? Probably not. That’s the negative aspect to the one-hit wonder deal.”
“We’ve had people hear us play,” Toby says with a laugh. “And say, ‘Man, you guys sound exactly like the band that does that song.”
In more recent times, Deep Blue Something has been performing concerts with other bands that hit it big in the ‘90s. Acts like Everclear, Sister Hazel and the Spin Doctors are groups that Todd and Toby have found a lot of common ground with. These are bands that rode the wave of major-label success and global stardom in their younger days only to see the eyes of the pop-culture mainstream diverted to other bands as the years rolled on.
Todd says that when Deep Blue Something gets together to perform these days, it’s “just hilariously fun.” Toby notes that for the band, “there’s really no pressure now like there was back then.” Age and experience have mellowed the one-time rock stars. The egos, attitudes and pretense of their glory days take a backseat now to simply being comfortable with who they are in the here and now.
“We’re all at an age where it’s cool to not have to be cool anymore,” Toby says.
And if the guys ever need an ego boost, the brothers Pipes know where to go to be reminded just how big of a deal “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has been for them.
“If we’re ever in a grocery store,” Todd says, “all we have to do is wait for a second and it’ll start playing.”
