Photo: WENN
After a night of bitterness and confusion, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker have slammed Tom DeLonge as 'disrespectful and ungrateful', and confirmed that he is no longer in the band.
Yesterday, Blink 182 announced that they would be playing the Barker-curated Musink festival without DeLonge, with Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba stepping in to fill his shoes. The band then issued a statement saying that DeLonge had quit the band 'indefinitely', before the guitarist denied this online and blamed miscommunication and their 'dysfunctional' nature.
Now, in a lengthy and brutal interview with Rolling Stone, the remaining members have clarified the situation, and pulled no punches when it comes to DeLonge's 'attitude'.
"Every single thing that we’ve heard from his camp - from e-mails from his manager to our production team - was, 'Tom is out indefinitely, for the foreseeable future, Tom is done'," said Hoppus.
He continued: "It feels humiliating to be in a band where you have to be apologizing for one person all the time. That’s how it’s felt for a long time."
"I just wish Tom does whatever makes him happy and stops holding Blink-182 back from what we all agree that we’re going to do: play shows, record music, continue this legacy and have a good time doing it."
When asked about continuing as Blink without DeLonge, Hoppus added: "There are legalities involved with this. As Tom pointed out, he technically didn’t quit the band. Then it gets all lawyer-y, which I will leave to the attorneys and managers. I just want to go out and play Blink songs. I want to go out and play the songs that we’ve been spending the last 20 years of our lives writing. That’s what Travis and I want to do. If Tom doesn’t want to do that, which obviously he doesn’t, that’s OK.
"He doesn’t have to be embarrassed or try to claim that he’s secretly really working on Blink. People know what’s up. C’mon, man."
Speaking of DeLonge's exit, Barker said: "I think he’s just bummed because Mark and I were finally honest. 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.
"Everyone should know what the story is with him and it’s been years with it. When we did get back together after my plane crash, we only got back together, I don’t know, maybe because I almost died. But he didn’t even listen to mixes or masterings from that record. He didn’t even care about it. Why Blink even got back together in the first place is questionable."
Watch Blink performing the aptly-titled 'Stay Together For The Kids' at Reading 2014 below
DeLonge is yet to comment on the latest quotes from his former bandmates, but last night he 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.
.jpg)
