Director Diane Ventura and frontman Ely Buendia discuss the new documentary Eraserheads: Combo on the Run, which traces the band’s formation — and reunion — amid political upheaval

A line has been forming for hours outside Café 86 in Artesia, California, when Eraserheads frontman Ely Buendia pulls up for a meet and greet. The beloved Filipino alt-rock band spawned a comic-book series that was featured at San Diego Comic-Con in 2024. Over the next few hours, dozens of fans stream in to get their comic books signed and to take photos with Buendia, some bringing instruments to be autographed by the singer, too. The event takes on the feel of a cathartic reunion: Attendees reminisce about their relationship to the band, effusively professing their love of Eraserheads to one another. 

“I wanted to marry him,” café owner Ginger Lim-Dimapasok, who was a teenager growing up in Manila in the Nineties, tells Rolling Stone. At that time, she says, “Everyone’s goal was to marry Ely Buendia … I had to meet the one that got away!” 

Eraserheads are one of the most influential rock bands the Philippines has produced. The group formed while all four members — lead vocalist and guitarist Buendia, bassist Buddy Zabala, guitarist Marcos Adoro, and drummer Raimund Marasigan, each of whom also performs backing vocals — were students at the University of Philippines Diliman in Quezon City in 1989. Four years later, the single “Pare Ko,” from their debut album Ultraelectromagneticpop!, became a hit, and by 1997 they were performing internationally. They won the 1997 MTV VMAs International Viewer’s Choice—Asia Award, starred in commercials and movies, and toured the world before the original lineup imploded in 2002 with Buendia’s abrupt departure, one that left fans to speculate over the band’s demise. 

Though they had a couple of reunions in the aughts, the band had never addressed the reasons behind their fracture, not even amongst themselves. But in a new documentary, Eraserheads: Combo on the Run, directed by Maria “Diane” Ventura — Buendia’s ex-wife, who produces live concerts, including ones by Eraserheads, and also serves as Buendia’s manager — they do just that, tracing the band’s formation amid national upheaval and the rocky path they traveled together. 

It was the band’s third reunion, in 2022, at SMDC Festival Grounds in Manila — the biggest concert in Philippines history at the time — that inspired the look-back documentary, which debuts worldwide on Netflix on May 30. As Ventura tells it, there was change in the air. “We were coming off of the pandemic. The nation was wrought with political turmoil, and I was like, ‘Something is happening,’” she says. “‘I don’t know what that is yet, but I have to document it.’”

In their early days, Eraserheads weren’t a particularly good band, as the film showcases via archival footage — far from the polished pop that was popular on the radio in the Philippines at that time. They were rejected by venues and labels alike. But gradually, they tapped into the moment in a way the country needed. It was the wake of the EDSA Revolution, also known as the People Power Revolution, a four-day uprising in 1986 that brought an end to martial law and the 20-year dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. People were craving the culture and art that had been suppressed during his oppressive reign. And soon enough, Eraserheads were winning over crowds and the industry with their raw, emotional rock and storytelling lyrics. 

“The word for Ely Buendia was ‘para sa masa,’ which meant he was for the masses,” Lim-Dimapasok says; the phrase is also the name of one of the band’s singles. “Their music was really a form of activism for many. I think that’s what made them so relatable to anyone.”

Being kids during those hardships in the Seventies deeply informed the music. “[We] grew up in the shadow of martial law and Marcos, which was the most offensive regime in Filipino history,” Buendia says. “The elders would talk about it, and you would hear it on the news, the oppression and the clampdown on freedoms. As a young child, that affects you.” He adds, “You can’t even say what you feel, like there was no press freedom. You’d get tortured or killed for just expressing yourself. It was a huge, huge deal.” 

Buendia says he wanted to rebel as soon as he could, and took that opportunity at UP when he formed Eraserheads. “One of our anthems, ‘Alapaap,’ which means ‘clouds’ or ‘heavens,’ is all about freedom,” he says. “I guess that’s what fans related to also.” It was politicized after a senator tried to ban the song from the radio, saying lines like “I’m flying and in the clouds”  promoted drug use. (The band denied the song was about drugs in a letter to the senator and in a meeting  they had with him.)   

But just a few years after the band reached global stardom, things fell apart. The day they broke up in 2002, Buendia texted his bandmates: “It’s time to graduate.” Twenty years would pass before they’d hash it all out. In the film, Ventura interviews the band members separately, with each person candidly reflecting on the group’s success and their downfall. The reasons behind their unraveling are not uncommon — creative and personal differences, ego, a dismal lack of communication — but their introspection so many years later brings added weight. The film serves as a therapeutic exploration of the past as well as the common ground that brought them back together: politics.

In September 2021, Eraserheads fans were beckoning for another reunion. Buendia responded on Twitter that if then-Vice President Leni Robredo entered the presidential race, they would reunite: “Pag tumakbo si Leni”  — if Leni runs. She threw her hat in the ring the next month, ushering in the viral “pink revolution” against frontrunner Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcus Jr., son of the late dictator. Though Robredo lost to Marcos, her historic run offered hope at a time when the nation needed it.

“She was very beloved in our region,” Buendia says of Robredo, a fellow Bicolano. “Very educated. Very capable. She was the hope for her supporters. She was the hope of the country because she represented the kind of governance that we wanted.” 

Buendia said later that he was only half-joking about reuniting the band if Robredo entered the race, but he did endorse Robredo, performed during her campaign, and in the end, the band did indeed reunite seven months after the election, in December 2022. And the film that grew out of that reunion allowed not only a kind of political healing, but a personal one, as the band confronted what went unspoken over some 30 years. 

“For the longest time, there was too much speculation on what happened with the band, ’cause we were quiet about it,” says Buendia. “It was just such a relief to let it all out.”