Photo: WENN
Tom Delonge has denied news that he has quit Blink 182, after the band announced a festival show without him and a comment circulated on band regarding his departure.
The band today announced their appearance at the Travis Barker curated Musink festival, albeit with Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba performing instead of DeLonge.
Then, a statement issued to Radio.com, said to be from remaining members Barker and Mark Hoppus, claimed that DeLonge had separated to focus on other endeavours, and that they would be continuing without him.
“We were all set to play this festival and record a new album and Tom kept putting it off without reason,” they wrote. “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 endeavours.”
There are “no hard feelings,” they added, “but the show must go on for our fans.”
The band and DeLonge are yet to issue further comment on the alleged statement - however Tom DeLonge took to Facebook to state:
DeLonge was a founding member of Blink, and just last month spoke to Gigwise about the band's follow-up to 2011's Neighbourhoods, and their future outside of his side-project, Angels & Airwaves.
"I'm not totally sure how it’s going to work but the goal is to find an area or an environment that’s different and not just a normal studio to be together as were architect the songs and inspire each other in ways that we did back in that timeframe," he told Gigwise.
"I think if we can pull off those few things we’ll be in really really good shape. We’ve always done what we liked, and on the Untitled record there was a lot of debate where we thought our fans wouldn’t even like it, but I think we succeeded by sticking to what we wanted to do, and it turned out to be the one that the fans like the most."
Last summer, Blink 182 headlined Reading & Leeds festival.
