As you may have seen, Blink 182 will be playing shows without founding member Tom Delonge. The group will be replacing him with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba for their upcoming performances.
According to a statement issued by Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker; “We were all set to play this festival and record a new album and Tom kept putting it off without reason. A week before we were scheduled to go in to the studio we got an email from his manager explaining that he didn’t want to participate in any Blink-182 projects indefinitely, but would rather work on his other non-musical endeavors.” Ok, seems like they ended things on weird terms but are still cool with each other, right? Wrong!
Delonge took to Instagram to post his side of the whole fiasco, saying: “To all the fans, I never quit the band. I actually was on a phone call about a blink 182 event for New York City at the time all these weird press releases started coming in… Apparently those releases were ‘sanctioned’ from the band. Are we dysfunctional- yes. But, Christ….. #Awkward #BabyBackRibs”
Now Hoppus and Barker both did an interview with Rolling Stone that same day to explain exactly what the Hell is going on:
After that interview was released around 9PM PST, Delonge fired back with this Tweet, which has since been deleted:
This isn’t the first time Delonge has been the main cause of frustration. When the group went on hiatus back in 2003 Tom was the main factor in that decision, he wanted to record in San Diego and refused to travel the 2 hours up to Los Angeles to record with the rest of the band and then decided to focus on his side project, Angels & Airwaves.
The worst part of this whole falling out is that Tom actually thinks people want more Angels & Airwaves. Yikes.
photo CoS
About James Sullivan