Music

Tom DeLonge thinks Blink-182 is conspiring against Angels & Airwaves

by Tyler Munro

On Monday, Blink-182 incumbents Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker announced that guitarist Tom DeLonge had left the band. It didn’t feel like much; maybe the end of an era that probably should have stopped fifteen years ago. Then things got weird.

Within hours, DeLonge was himself issuing a statement: That he hadn’t left Blink-182, and that he was actually working on an event for the band when he heard the news. But was DeLonge even invested anymore? That’s the argument Hoppus and Barker have been making in the two days since.

Talking to Rolling Stone, Hoppus says the decision to announce DeLonge’s departure may not have been the lip-ringed guitarist’s own, but it certainly came as the result of his camp. Hoppus and Barker say that DeLonge’s management regularly cancelled studio dates, backed away from shows and, more recently and definitively, informed them that Tom was out “indefinitely.”

“It feels humiliating to be in a band where you have to be apologizing for one person all the time,” said Hoppus, who elaborated to say he and Barker grew tired of covering for DeLonge after years of promising new music to fans.

On Facebook, DeLonge gave his side of the story, this time without awkward Tron Guy memes and non sequitur hashtags. Not that it makes his arguments any less peculiar.

In a long, rambling letter to the fans, DeLonge says that much of the rift starts, perhaps unsurprisingly, with his hyper-pretentious Angels & Airwaves project. If you read Rolling Stone’s interview with Barker and Hoppus, you’ll see two musicians insisting that the chase for a new record deal was entirely DeLonge’s. It’s curious, then, that in his open letter, he mentions a 60-page contract that caused an initial rift between the three friends.

He says the contract held a provision that prevented him from releasing an Angels and Airwaves album for 9 months, and that Blink-182 would have to record their new album in 6. Remember: Dude Ranch, arguably the band’s most revered album, was recorded in 5 weeks.

Boiled down, it looks like the split started from DeLonge’s desire to use Blink-182 as his security blanket. He wanted to focus on love songs about aliens, not songs about their farts, all the while Mark and Hoppus seemed eager to keep playing songs about 20-year-olds to increasingly bald audiences. DeLonge is quick to bring up how he and Hoppus briefly talked about ousting Barker, and he said, but he also said, and ultimately, it just feels so petty, even for a band who seems to exist solely to sell Atticus, Macbeth and Famous Stars & Straps belt-buckles.

At the end of his letter, DeLonge writes that he “never planned on quitting, just find it hard as hell to commit,” and on that note, Hopper and Barker might agree. But even that moment of candour comes after walls of self flagellating text: How his boyhood band stifled his desires to make Angels & Airwaves comics, books and movies. About how hurt he was to take charge on an EP the band eventually tried to scrap. About how, even in their 40s, the band is sputtering through maturity.

To that end, two questions: Can we just have Scott Raynor back and, seriously—what’s my age again? Whatever you answer, it’s probably too old to keep up with this.