This is a bizarre story and if it was about somebody I actually like I might be much more interested in it but the only thing Blink 182 ever did I loved was “What’s my Age Again” -I saw em on that tour and thought they were awesome (Kid Rock was at the same gig, circa his first album and he was brilliant). But anyway, after that I never much cared, the infantile acting your age only works once as both bands proved.
So any way, Tom Delonge who, really, is the face of Blink 182 was fired via press release last week. Though Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker told Rolling Stone otherwise: “We booked January 5th to go into the studio,” said Hoppus. “On December 30th, we get an e-mail from Tom’s manager saying that he has no interest in recording and that he wants to do his other, non-musical stuff and that he’s out indefinitely. There’s a flurry of e-mails going back and forth for clarification about the recording and the show and his manager sends [an e-mail] back saying, ‘Tom. Is. Out.’ Direct quote. This is the exact same e-mail we got back in 2004 when Tom went on indefinite hiatus before.”
This is from Gigwise:
“News broke of DeLonge’s departure in January, after it was announced that they would be playing Musink Festival with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba instead of DeLonge. The band subsequently issued a statement to say that the “disrespectful and ungrateful” DeLonge had left the band indefinitely.
DeLonge subsequently published an open letter insisting that he wrote to the band a year ago, as well as to their managers, who insisted his bandmates agreed with his ideas of how to grow the band – “So you can imagine my surprise when a press release went out yesterday—without my knowledge—about the band’s future. This is new to me. It’s not in my nature to fuel negativity about the legacy of the band on something as trashy as the Internet world.”
He’s now released two excerpts from songs with the caption ‘#SongsWithoutAHome’. The first, which has been filmed with planets on the screen, is a purely instrumental, upbeat number.”
Back to the Rolling Stone interview, this is Barker: “We always covered up for him before. It was always, ‘We’re going to record an album,’ then ‘Tom refuses to get into the studio without a record deal.’ So everyone does hella amounts of work to get a record deal and now Tom isn’t part of Blink-182. It’s hard to cover for someone who’s disrespectful and ungrateful. You don’t even have the balls to call your bandmates and tell them you’re not going to record or do anything Blink-related. You have your manager do it.“