The story of Blink-182

Three kids in the San Diego suburbs

The story begins in Poway, a quiet suburb north of San Diego. Tom DeLonge was born there on the thirteenth of December 1975. He got his first guitar as a sixth grade Christmas present, a battered acoustic worth about thirty dollars, and he lived for skateboarding. A friend in Oregon played him Stiff Little Fingers, the Descendents and Dinosaur Jr., and that was it. In his junior year Tom showed up drunk at a Poway High basketball game and was sent to Rancho Bernardo High School for a semester. There he entered a Battle of the Bands with an original song called Who's Gonna Shave Your Back Tonight. At that school he also met a young drummer named Scott Raynor, and a friend named Kerry Key, whose girlfriend was Anne Hoppus.[1] [2] [3]

Anne's older brother Mark was born on the fifteenth of March 1972 in Ridgecrest, a desert town where his father designed weapons for the Navy testing center. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he later described a lonely childhood shuttled between homes. His father gave him his first bass at fifteen, and he taught himself by playing along to the Descendents, the Cure and Bad Religion. For a while he even wore eyeliner and red lipstick to school, copying Robert Smith. In the summer of 1992 he moved to San Diego to study at college and work in a record store. He told his sister he wanted to be in a band. She knew exactly who he should meet.[1] [2]

Anne introduced Mark to Tom on the second of August 1992. They went straight to Tom's garage and played for hours. Mark brought a bass line he had stumbled onto while failing to learn Fur Elise, Tom added a fast riff of his own, and that first night they wrote Carousel, a song the band still plays today. Trying to impress his new friend, Mark climbed a lamppost outside Tom's house and hurt both ankles on the way down, which left him on crutches for weeks. Tom brought in Scott Raynor, who was only fourteen, and the three began rehearsing in Scott's bedroom, with egg cartons on the walls to deaden the sound and neighbors complaining anyway.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They tried names like Duck Tape and Figure 8 before Tom settled on Blink. Early on, Mark's girlfriend made him choose between her and the band, and he briefly quit. When he heard Tom and Scott were about to record a demo without him, he broke up with her and came back. That first tape, Flyswatter, was made in Scott's bedroom in May 1993. Tom phoned every club and school in town, even pitching Blink to high schools as a motivational band with a strong anti drug message, hoping to play at lunchtime. They played Elks Lodges and YMCA halls and opened shows at SOMA, the all ages club they dreamed of headlining. In January 1994, with money from Mark's record store manager Pat Secor, they recorded a cassette called Buddha.[1] [2] [3]

Cheshire Cat, a new name and life in a van

Buddha caught the ear of Cargo, the label at the heart of San Diego's underground scene. The label's president, Eric Goodis, was not convinced, but his teenage son Brahm kept pushing, and even left a Buddha cassette in his father's car stereo. Cargo signed Blink on a trial basis through a side imprint called Grilled Cheese. Mark was the only member to sign the contract, because Scott was still a minor and Tom was at work delivering cement. The band got a budget of fifteen hundred dollars and three days at Westbeach Recorders in Hollywood, a studio owned by members of Bad Religion. They got lost on the way and arrived three hours late, worked twelve hour days, and all three slept in a single motel bed to save money.[1] [2]

The debut album, Cheshire Cat, came out on the seventeenth of February 1995. The cover was a Siamese cat taken from a calendar Tom had bought from a door to door salesman. Cargo pressed just one thousand copies, and Goodis reportedly bet his staff it would never sell past that first run. It did, easily. Within a year it had sold about seventy thousand copies, and by 2001 more than a quarter of a million. A San Diego radio DJ at 91X started playing the song M+M's, and Cargo paid for a video. There was one problem. An Irish band called Blink objected to the name, and Cargo told the trio to pick something new or have one picked for them.[1] [2]

After weeks of dithering, Mark simply suggested adding the number one eighty-two, and the label accepted on the spot. Around this time the band also found a manager, Rick DeVoe, a surf and punk promoter who had worked with the Offspring and Pennywise. Tom won him over with a homemade press kit of fanzine clippings and cartoons, before DeVoe had even seen them play. In late 1995 they bought a van, nicknamed it the Millennium Falcon, and joined a tour for Taylor Steele's surf film Good Times, sometimes playing for fifty dollars a night. Pennywise then paid their airfares so they could open in Australia, where crowds already knew the songs from surf videos. Mark was stunned to hear fans on the other side of the world singing along.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge believed in them so strongly that he pushed Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman to book them, predicting they would become gigantic. In 1996 Blink-182 played the Warped Tour, riding between shows on a production bus with the crew because they could not afford their own. That year they also toured Canada and Japan, went back to Australia, and endured a winter run they called the Shitty Weather Tour, including a seventeen hour drive through a huge snowstorm. Australia in particular loved their stage antics, but the jokes also got them written off as a novelty act back home. By the end of the Cheshire Cat cycle they had crossed the United States three times and built a loyal following the hard way.[1] [2]

Dude Ranch, Dammit and a drummer change

By March 1996, major labels were circling. Interscope, MCA and the punk label Epitaph all wanted the band. MCA promised total creative freedom and won, though the punk scene called them sellouts for it. Scott Raynor had wanted Epitaph, and he later said that decision was the moment he became only half invested in the band. At a signing party at the Hotel del Coronado, after an argument with a girlfriend, a drunk Scott jumped from a second floor balcony and broke both his heels. When the band went into Big Fish Studios in December 1996 to make their second album with producer Mark Trombino, Scott recorded his drum parts after wheeling himself up to the kit in a wheelchair.[1] [2] [3]

The sessions were hard on everyone. Tom kept redoing vocals, Mark lost his voice after a Christmas show and quit smoking to save it, and the whole record stretched into January 1997. Mark had written one song called Dammit in a few minutes, around a riff he found on an acoustic guitar that was missing two strings. The title came from an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. The label's welcome was cool. Mark later recalled playing the finished album at MCA's offices, and watching the small audience drift away one by one until only the band was left listening. Dude Ranch came out on the seventeenth of June 1997, with a bull on the cover and the band's name branded on its rear.[1] [2]

At first, Dude Ranch sold slowly, and the band sold copies out of the back of the van. Then Los Angeles station KROQ added Dammit in the autumn of 1997, other stations followed, and by December MTV had the video in heavy rotation. The song, with its refrain about growing up, reached number eleven on the modern rock chart and became the band's traditional closing number. Dude Ranch was certified gold on the ninth of February 1998 and platinum the following year. The band played a full summer on the Warped Tour, and a single called Josie, with actress Alyssa Milano starring in the video, kept the momentum going. But the endless touring was wearing the three of them down.[1] [2] [3]

In early 1998, on the SnoCore tour, tensions centred on Scott, who had been drinking heavily to cope with personal problems. When Scott flew home during a West Coast run, the band borrowed Travis Barker, drummer of the support act the Aquabats. Travis learned the twenty song set in forty-five minutes and played it flawlessly. Scott came back, but after an Australian tour Mark and Tom gave him an ultimatum by phone: stop drinking or go to rehab. What happened next is still told differently, but by mid 1998 Scott was out, and Travis was in. Scott later said the others were right to let him go. The band would later write a song about the split called Man Overboard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Enema of the State and the TRL years

Travis Barker was born in Fontana, California, on the fourteenth of November 1975. His mother gave him his first drum kit at four. She died the day before he started high school, after telling him to keep playing and follow his dreams. He played in jazz band and marching band, worked as a garbage man in Laguna Beach, and joined the Aquabats, where he was nicknamed Baron Von Tito, though nobody remembers why. With Travis on board, Blink-182 were asked to appear in the teen comedy American Pie. To record a song called Mutt for it, they hired producer Jerry Finn, who had mixed Green Day's Dookie. The session went so well that they asked Finn to make their next album, and vowed never to work with anyone else.[1] [2] [3]

Enema of the State was recorded in early 1999 with a budget of about three hundred thousand dollars. Travis tracked his drums at a Los Angeles studio once owned by Chick Corea, and laid down nearly all of them in about eight hours, without headphones. Finn brought racks of gear, pushed the band hard, and kept everyone laughing. Mark said a typical day ended with the whole band naked, piling on top of the producer. Keyboard player Roger Joseph Manning Jr., known for his work with Beck, added parts that brightened the sound. The cover showed adult film actress Janine Lindemulder as a nurse pulling on a latex glove. The American Red Cross objected to the red cross on her cap, and later pressings had to remove it.[1] [2]

The album came out on the first of June 1999 and was an immediate smash. The first single, What's My Age Again, was originally titled Peter Pan Complex, and its video showed the three of them running naked through Los Angeles. All the Small Things, which Tom wrote as a deliberately simple radio song and an ode to his girlfriend, went to number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in Britain. Its video mocked the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, and the band became fixtures on MTV's Total Request Live. At the start of the tour they drove themselves in a van with a trailer. By the end they were flying on private jets. Enema of the State eventually sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The third single was different. Mark wrote Adam's Song, on hotel stationery, about the loneliness of coming home from tour to an empty house while his bandmates had partners waiting. It takes the form of a suicide note before turning hopeful at the end. Then, in May 2000, a student who had survived the Columbine High School shooting took his own life with the song playing on repeat. Mark was devastated. He had meant it as an anti suicide song. Over the years, many fans have written to say it helped them survive their own darkest moments, and Mark has said talking about it with them feels like sharing the hardest time of his life.[1] [2] [3]

Blink-182 leaned into the craziness. They opened the 1999 Billboard Music Awards naked except for copies of Billboard magazine, and in American Pie Mark improvised a throwaway line about a trig class that strangers soon started shouting at him. Commercially the band was now enormous, but the image began to bother them. They were starring in teen magazines, and a European arm of their label had even sent out their boy band parody photos as if they were serious. In November 2000 they released a live album, The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show, full of fast songs and filthy banter. It sold half a million copies in two months, while fans waited for a proper follow up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Number one, and the first cracks

The follow up was made under pressure. Tom later said the head of MCA was penalizing them heavily because the record would miss a quarterly revenue deadline. In December 2000 they began writing, and around this time Travis asked to become a full partner. Until then he had been treated as a hired player with no songwriting credit, even though he had arranged much of Enema. Mark and Tom agreed. When manager Rick DeVoe heard the new songs and asked where the fun summer single was, the two songwriters were furious. Mark went home and wrote The Rock Show in about ten minutes, and Tom wrote First Date, about his first date with his future wife at SeaWorld in San Diego.[1] [2] [3]

The album got its name from a guitar tech, Larry Palm, who overheard a mother telling her drenched son to take off his pants and jacket. The title is also a crude pun, and Palm later sued, settling for ten thousand dollars. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket was released on the twelfth of June 2001 and went straight to number one in America. It was darker and heavier than before, with Tom drawing on post hardcore bands like Fugazi. Stay Together for the Kids came from the day Tom, at eighteen, came home to find his father's furniture gone and his mother crying. Its first video showed a house being destroyed by a wrecking ball, and after the September eleventh attacks it was reshot.[1] [2]

In 2002 Blink-182 co-headlined the Pop Disaster Tour with Green Day, playing arenas across North America. Mark later wrote that he sensed Green Day hated opening for the younger band, and that some nights ended in drinks and others in screaming matches with Green Day's manager. Travis also found a new outlet. Through Jerry Finn, Tim Armstrong of Rancid invited him to make a rap rock record called Transplants, and Rolling Stone called him punk's first superstar drummer. By now all three were wealthy, recognised everywhere, and running an operation of dozens of crew members. They were also being stalked. Mark eventually moved behind a gate after a woman began logging their comings and goings with binoculars and a telephoto lens.[1] [2] [3]

The biggest crack came from inside. In late 2001 a herniated disc left Tom in chronic pain, and a European tour was cancelled. He poured his darker ideas into a side project called Box Car Racer, recorded over six weeks from December 2001. He asked Travis to play drums, saying he simply did not want to pay a session player. Mark was left out, and felt betrayed. The Box Car Racer album came out in May 2002, reached number twelve in America, and toured the country. Mark later said that by the end of 2001 it felt like Blink-182 had broken up, even though nobody said it. Tom would call the project both the greatest and the worst thing that ever happened to the band.[1] [2] [3]

The untitled album and the breakup

In January 2003 the band rented a gated mansion in Rancho Santa Fe and turned it into a studio. The plan was to reinvent how they wrote, building songs together from scratch. Jerry Finn filled the house with more than seventy guitars and dozens of snare drums. Mark played a vintage bass bought from a Liverpool shop where the Beatles had bought gear. After sixty days they had just two finished songs, and the owners asked them to leave. Recording moved around San Diego and Los Angeles until October, and the bill passed one million dollars. By the time the album came out, all three had become fathers. Mark and his wife had a son, Jack, in 2002, and Travis's son Landon arrived in October 2003.[1] [2] [3]

The fifth album had no title at all and a new smiley face logo on the cover. It came out on the eighteenth of November 2003 on Geffen, which had absorbed MCA. The sound was moodier and more experimental. The opener, Feeling This, was written by Mark and Tom in separate rooms, and they discovered they had both written about sex. I Miss You was built on acoustic bass, cello and a looped brushed drum pattern, inspired by the Cure. A line about Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas was aimed at Travis's girlfriend, Shanna Moakler. And Robert Smith himself sang on a track called All of This, a dream come true for Mark, who had once copied his makeup.[1] [2] [3]

I Miss You topped the modern rock chart and reached the top ten in Britain, and Tom's drawn out way of singing certain words in it later became an internet joke. Critics were kind, and the band regarded the record as a huge turning point. On tour they played Japan and Australia, and performed for American troops stationed in the Persian Gulf in the first year of the Iraq war. In Melbourne in 2004 Travis badly injured his foot, played the next show using his left foot on the kick drum, and the tour had to be cancelled. In October 2004 he married Shanna Moakler in a ceremony themed on The Nightmare Before Christmas, and MTV began filming a reality show about the couple.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Underneath, the old wounds were open. Tom wanted to take six months off to be with his young family. Mark and Travis thought that was far too long, and Tom also hated the idea of TV cameras following the band for Meet the Barkers. After the Indian Ocean tsunami, they agreed to play a benefit show, and the rehearsals turned bitter. Tom walked away. On the twenty-second of February 2005, a statement announced an indefinite hiatus. In reality, it was a breakup. Mark later wrote that everything suddenly had to go through lawyers and managers, and that he was paying a lawyer to talk to the kid he used to skateboard with. That October, the label released a Greatest Hits album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Apart, then tragedy, then together again

Tom disappeared for weeks on what he called a spiritual journey, then announced a new band, Angels and Airwaves, promising the greatest rock and roll revolution for this generation. The press mocked the claim. Tom later admitted that during this period he was addicted to the painkiller Vicodin, taken for his back, and that his managers staged an intervention over his state of mind. When he could not get the drug for a week, he went through a hallucinating withdrawal. Angels and Airwaves released We Don't Need to Whisper in 2006 and I-Empire in 2007. For years he did not speak to Mark or Travis, and his interviews often blamed them for the split.[1] [2] [3]

Mark and Travis started again in Travis's basement and Mark's dining room, making quiet electronic demos. They named the project +44, after the phone code for Britain, where they had first talked about working together. In October 2005 they bought a studio in North Hollywood, and the band grew heavier. Their only album, When Your Heart Stops Beating, came out in November 2006 and sold modestly. Travis's marriage was falling apart in public. He filed for divorce from Shanna Moakler in August 2006, and the pair aired their problems on MySpace. He later admitted he was taking large amounts of prescription painkillers, marijuana and alcohol, and that by 2007 the painkillers had become a full addiction.[1] [2]

In July 2008, Jerry Finn collapsed from a brain hemorrhage while having lunch in West Hollywood. He never regained consciousness, was taken off life support on the ninth of August, and died on the twenty-first of August 2008, aged thirty-nine. Finn had produced four Blink-182 albums and acted as their adviser and peacemaker. Mark called him a lifelong friend and mentor, and said everything he knew about recording he learned from Jerry. A memorial was held in the parking lot of Conway studios, his favorite place to work, with the Beach Boys song God Only Knows playing on repeat. Less than a month later, the band would be hit again.[1] [2] [3]

On the night of the nineteenth of September 2008, Travis and his friend Adam Goldstein, known as DJ AM, had played a free show in Columbia, South Carolina. Just before midnight their chartered Learjet blew tires on takeoff. The captain tried to abort too late, and the plane ran off the runway, through a fence, across a highway, and burst into flames. The pilots Sarah Lemmon and James Bland died, along with Travis's assistant Chris Baker and his friend and security guard Charles Still, known as Che, who had only come along because a seat was free. Travis and Adam escaped burning. Investigators blamed badly under inflated tires and the late decision to abort.[1] [2] [3]

Travis suffered burns over most of his body, spent weeks in burn centers and went through sixteen surgeries. He developed post traumatic stress and later admitted he had thought about ending his life. Mark flew straight to the burn unit. Tom heard the news on television at an airport and cried in his seat. He mailed Travis a letter and two photos, one of the old band and one of himself with his kids. In October 2008 the three met at Mark and Travis's studio and talked for hours, and on the eighth of February 2009 they walked onstage at the Grammys to announce they were back. That August, Adam Goldstein was found dead in New York from an accidental overdose.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The reunion years and a second exit

The reunion tour ran from July to October 2009 with Weezer and Fall Out Boy, and it sold out amphitheaters across America. Tom later said he was dumbfounded by how big it was. Travis now refused to fly, so he crossed North America by bus and later travelled to Europe by ocean liner. He toured with broken vertebrae and still had sores on his hands and legs. In 2010 Tom was treated for skin cancer. Mark was juggling a new TV show called Hoppus on Music, and in 2011 he moved his family to London. The friendship was back, Mark said, but it felt like they were huddled around a tiny flame, scared to breathe too hard in case it went out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Without Jerry Finn, they tried to produce the comeback album themselves, and it was a struggle. Tom recorded in San Diego while Mark and Travis worked in Los Angeles, trading files by email. At one point the band had four managers, and Mark and Tom reportedly went months speaking only through them. Mark later wondered whether self producing had been a mistake, saying nobody was driving. Neighborhoods came out in September 2011 and reached number two in America, but sales disappointed the label. In October 2012 the band left Interscope and self released an EP, Dogs Eating Dogs, that December, distributed through Tom's company Modlife.[1] [2] [3]

The mood stayed tense. Travis still would not fly, so Brooks Wackerman of Bad Religion drummed in his place on a 2013 Australian tour. They celebrated ten years of the untitled album and headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals. But a new album kept failing to happen. Travis later claimed in his memoir that Tom was withdrawn on tour until money was involved, and that Tom quit once in 2014 and rejoined the next day. Tom was spending more and more time on other interests, especially UFOs and a website called Strange Times. His last show in this era was at a festival in Las Vegas on the eleventh of October 2014.[1] [2] [3]

By Christmas Eve 2014 all three had signed a new record deal, and studio time was booked for early January. On the thirtieth of December, an email arrived from Tom's manager saying he was out indefinitely to focus on non musical projects. On the twenty-sixth of January 2015, Mark and Travis announced it publicly and called Tom ungrateful and disingenuous. Tom replied on Instagram that he had never quit the band. He said he had been handed a sixty page contract demanding an album within six months, and that he could not abandon his other commitments. That year he launched a company called To the Stars, which grew into an organisation devoted to investigating UFOs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Matt Skiba years

Mark and Travis needed someone for three shows in March 2015, and there was only one name on the list. Matt Skiba, born in Chicago in 1976, fronted the dark, beloved punk band Alkaline Trio, and Mark had wanted to work with him for years. After a lunch meeting and some rehearsals, Matt filled in, and once the legal wrangling with Tom was settled he became a full member. Some fans were hostile at first, but Matt later said the hate only lasted until they started playing shows. It was the first time Mark had ever performed as Blink-182 without Tom beside him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For the new album, Travis called his old friend John Feldmann of Goldfinger, the band's first new producer since Jerry Finn. On their first day together at Feldmann's studio they wrote Bored to Death. The sessions ran up to eighteen hours a day and produced dozens of songs. One of them, San Diego, was about their hometown and, underneath, about Tom. California came out on the first of July 2016 and went to number one in America, their first chart topper there in fifteen years, and their first ever number one in Britain. Bored to Death topped the alternative chart, and the album earned the band its first Grammy nomination, for Best Rock Album.[1] [2]

After the long California tour, Mark sank into depression. His wife Skye urged him to do what made him happiest, which was writing music, and that led to Simple Creatures, a duo with Alex Gaskarth of All Time Low, announced in January 2019. The band then moved to Columbia for Nine, released on the twentieth of September 2019. They scrapped an early batch of songs that Travis joked sounded like California 2, and brought in outside writers and producers. The lyrics were dark, shaped by Mark's depression and by a 2018 mass shooting at a bar in Thousand Oaks, less than two miles from Travis's home. Nine debuted at number three in America.[1] [2] [3]

Then the pandemic arrived. A planned 2020 tour was shelved, and the band released a song called Quarantine that did not feature Matt, who said he lacked a proper home studio. It quietly raised questions about his future. His last show with Blink-182 turned out to be a radio festival in Los Angeles on the eighteenth of January 2020. Meanwhile, Tom's UFO work was making headlines. His company had released three military videos of unidentified objects in 2017, and in April 2020 the Pentagon officially declassified them. The guitarist who sang Aliens Exist back in 1999 had even produced a History Channel series about UFOs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cancer, the return of Tom, and the legacy

In June 2021 Mark accidentally posted a photo of himself receiving chemotherapy to his public Instagram story. On the twenty-third of June he confirmed he had cancer, and had been treated secretly for three months. It was stage four diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. The chemotherapy damaged his body and his voice, and his doctor suggested he write as a way to cope. Tom turned out to be one of his biggest supporters, calling often. Before long, the three of them met privately at Mark's home to talk through old problems. At the end of September 2021 Mark announced he was cancer free, though he would keep being screened every six months.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 2022 the band wiped its social media and began posting cryptic messages. On the eleventh of October it confirmed Tom was back, with a new album and a world tour on the way. Matt Skiba had not been told what the announcement was, but he congratulated them, and Tom wrote him a public note of thanks. The single Edging came out three days later and spent thirteen weeks at number one on the alternative airplay chart. Travis also returned to the skies. He had not flown since the crash, but in August 2021 he took a flight to Mexico with his new partner Kourtney Kardashian. They married in 2022, and their son was born in November 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The reunion album, One More Time, came out on the twentieth of October 2023. Travis produced it himself, mostly at his studio in Woodland Hills, which Mark and Tom joked looked like a punk rock day spa. At first Mark took a while to trust the reconciliation. The songs looked back on the band's own history, on Mark's cancer, and on Robert Ortiz, Mark's longtime bass tech, who died in 2021. The acoustic title track asks why it takes tragedy to bring friends back together, and all three sing its refrain. It became the band's third number one album in America, and the title song spent twenty straight weeks at number one on the alternative airplay chart.[1] [2]

In 2025 the story kept going. At a Los Angeles wildfire benefit in February, Matt Skiba joined the band to sing Bored to Death with Tom. Mark sold a Banksy painting he had owned since 2011 for about five point four million dollars, with part of the money going to a children's hospital, cancer research and wildfire relief. That April he published a memoir, Fahrenheit-182, saying he wanted a book with no villains. The Missionary Impossible tour followed, and in September they headlined Riot Fest in Chicago. In 2026 a documentary, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear, told the story of Travis's crash and recovery, nearly ten years after filming began.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Blink-182 have sold around fifty million albums worldwide. Critics once dismissed them as a joke, but in 2011 the New York Times argued that no punk band of the nineties had been more influential. Fall Out Boy, Paramore, All Time Low, Panic! at the Disco, 5 Seconds of Summer, and even Taylor Swift and the late Juice Wrld have pointed to them as an influence, and the Chainsmokers named them in the lyrics of their hit Closer. Countless teenagers learned guitar on the opening riff of Dammit. As of 2026, the band is Mark, Tom and Travis again, with Mark still the only member who has been there from the very first night in a Poway garage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Blink-182

Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge. They wrote their first song on the night they met in August 1992 and became best friends, trading lead vocals for more than a decade. Box Car Racer drove a wedge between them, and after the 2005 split they did not speak for years, communicating through lawyers. They reunited in 2009, split again in 2015, and reconciled for good when Tom stood by Mark during his cancer treatment in 2021. Their friendship has been described as being as rocky and passionate as a marriage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker. Travis joined in 1998 and became Mark's closest ally when the band fell apart. After Tom left in 2005 they formed +44 together and bought a studio. When Travis was burned in the 2008 plane crash, Mark flew straight to the burn unit. In 2015 they kept Blink-182 going with Matt Skiba, making two albums as a pair before Tom's return in 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker. Tom and Travis made Box Car Racer together in 2001, the project that left Mark feeling betrayed. After the 2005 breakup Tom cut contact with both bandmates, but the 2008 plane crash changed everything. Tom mailed Travis a letter and photos, and it was Tom who first raised the idea of reuniting. In later years the two repaired their friendship first, and even recorded a new Box Car Racer song, which became the Blink-182 track Terrified.[1] [2] [3]

Mark Hoppus and Scott Raynor. Scott joined at fourteen and spent one of the happiest summers of his life living with Mark's family, finishing school through homework on tour. Their bond broke when Scott was dismissed in 1998 over his drinking. A year later Scott called Mark to list his grievances, and that was the last time they spoke. In his memoir Mark wrote that he would love to have closure with Scott someday. As of 2023, Scott was a San Diego police officer.[1] [2]

Blink-182 and Jerry Finn. Finn produced Enema of the State, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, the untitled album and the live record, and the band vowed never to work with anyone else. He was part adviser, part referee, and famously good humoured in the studio. His death in August 2008 devastated the band. When they made One More Time years later, Travis said he kept asking himself what Jerry would have done.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Blink-182 and Rick DeVoe. DeVoe became their manager after Tom handed him a homemade press kit, and he guided them from surf video tours to arenas, even directing their documentary The Urethra Chronicles. But he also managed Tom's Box Car Racer, and Mark and Travis came to see him as mainly representing Tom's interests, which fed the divisions before the 2005 split. DeVoe went on managing Tom and Angels and Airwaves until 2019.[1]

Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler. Travis began dating the actress and beauty queen in the early 2000s, and their son Landon was born in 2003. They married in October 2004 in a Nightmare Before Christmas themed wedding and starred in the MTV reality show Meet the Barkers. Travis filed for divorce in August 2006, they briefly reconciled, and the divorce was finalised in February 2008. In 2014 police were called to a heated argument between them, though no charges were filed.[1]

Travis Barker and Kourtney Kardashian. Their relationship became public in January 2021, and it was with Kourtney that Travis took his first flight since the 2008 crash, to Mexico that August. They got engaged that October, held an unofficial Las Vegas wedding in April 2022, married legally in Santa Barbara that May and had a church ceremony in Portofino, Italy. Their son was born in November 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Travis Barker and DJ AM. Travis and Adam Goldstein formed a drums and turntables duo called TRV$DJAM in 2008 and played the MTV Video Music Awards that September. Days later they were the only survivors of the Learjet crash in South Carolina, and Adam helped put out the flames on Travis's feet. Less than a year later, in August 2009, Adam died of an accidental overdose in New York.[1] [2] [3]

Mark Hoppus and Skye Everly. Mark met Skye, then an MTV talent executive, at a rehearsal for the All the Small Things video in 1999. Tom tried to set them up, and she said no at first. They married in December 2000 and had a son, Jack, in 2002. When Mark fell into depression after the California tour, Skye urged him back to making music, and together they later sold their beloved Banksy to help wildfire and cancer charities.[1] [2] [3]

Blink-182 and Matt Skiba. Matt stepped in for Tom in 2015, faced early hostility from fans, and made two albums with the band. He was not told what the 2022 announcement would be, but congratulated the classic line up anyway, and Tom publicly thanked him. The goodwill lasted. In 2025 Matt joined them onstage to sing Bored to Death, and his band Alkaline Trio opened their tour that year.[1] [2] [3]

Blink-182 and Green Day. Green Day were the older kings of pop punk, and Blink-182 were sometimes seen as their brattier imitators. In 2002 the two bands co-headlined the Pop Disaster Tour. Mark wrote that he sensed Green Day hated opening for them, and that some nights ended in drinks and others in screaming matches with their manager. He says Blink keep asking for a rematch, and Green Day keep saying no.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Blink-182

• Tom DeLonge once convinced San Diego high schools that Blink was a motivational band with a strong anti drug message. In the early days Tom phoned schools constantly looking for gigs. He pitched the band as a motivational act with an anti drug message, hoping to be booked for an assembly or a lunchtime show.[1] [2]
• Mark Hoppus hurt both ankles falling from a lamppost while trying to impress Tom DeLonge. Soon after they met in 1992, Mark climbed a streetlight outside Tom's house to show off. He came down badly and spent the next few weeks on crutches.[1] [2]
• The bass line of Carousel came from Mark failing to learn Beethoven's Fur Elise. Mark brought the idea to his very first jam with Tom in August 1992. Tom added a fast riff, and the two built Carousel that same night.[1]
• All three band members slept in one motel bed while recording their debut album. Cargo gave the band just fifteen hundred dollars and three days at Westbeach Recorders. To save money they shared a single bed in a rundown motel and lived on cheap burritos.[1]
• The cat on the Cheshire Cat cover came from a calendar bought from a door to door salesman. Tom bought the calendar at work. The company refused to license the photo, so the label's art department altered the image to avoid copyright problems.[1]
• Cargo's owner reportedly bet his staff Cheshire Cat would never sell beyond its first one thousand copies. The label pressed just one thousand copies. The album sold out that run quickly and became Cargo's best selling release, passing a quarter of a million copies by 2001.[1]
• MTV refused to show the band's first video, for M+M's, because it showed guns. After San Diego station 91X championed the song, Cargo paid for a video directed by Darren Doane. MTV declined to air it over the firearm imagery.[1]
• Tom DeLonge was arrested for underage drinking after a Halloween show in Jacksonville, Florida. It happened on the band's first national tour in 1995, when they were playing for as little as fifty dollars a night and sleeping in their van.[1]
• Scott Raynor recorded the drums for Dude Ranch while using a wheelchair. At the band's major label signing party he jumped from a second floor balcony after an argument and broke both heels. Producer Mark Trombino remembered him scooting from the wheelchair onto the drum stool.[1]
• The riff of Dammit was born on an acoustic guitar that was missing two strings. Mark Hoppus had to play around the gaps, which produced the melody that became one of rock's great beginner riffs. The title came from Beavis and Butt-Head.[1]
• Management talked the band out of including a Macarena parody called Hey Wipe Your Anus on Dude Ranch. Mark said the problem was not how stupid it was, but legal clearance for the parody.[1]
• Travis Barker learned Blink-182's twenty song set in forty-five minutes before his first show with them. He was the drummer for support band the Aquabats when Scott Raynor had to fly home in 1998. He played the set flawlessly and was soon asked to stay.[1] [2]
• Travis Barker's first drumming hero was Animal from The Muppets. He later got to play alongside Animal and the Electric Mayhem band on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2012. The first song he learned on drums was Van Halen's Jump.[1]
• The credits of American Pie list Travis Barker as Scott Raynor. The band made a cameo as a garage band in the 1999 comedy. Mark Hoppus improvised a line about a trig class that strangers started shouting at him in public.[1] [2]
• What's My Age Again was written as Hoppus tried, and failed, to play Green Day's song J.A.R. Messing up the bass intro gave him a new riff. He wrote the line about being twenty-three when he was actually twenty-six, simply because it rhymed.[1]
• The working title of All the Small Things was Babycakes-Buttermuffin. Early demos also labelled it the Ramones style song. Tom wrote it after deciding the album needed one really catchy, basic song for radio.[1]
• All the Small Things was kept off number one in Britain by Geri Halliwell. It peaked at number two on the UK singles chart in March 2000, behind her single Bag It Up. In America it reached number six on the Hot 100.[1]
• Enema of the State's working title was Turn Your Head and Cough, which inspired the cover's latex glove. Other rejected titles included Vasectomy and Does That Look Infected. The photographer said the glove idea came from the original title.[1]
• The American Red Cross forced a change to the Enema of the State cover. The nurse's cap originally carried a red cross, an emblem protected under the Geneva Conventions. Later pressings replaced it with a plain white cap.[1]
• Mark Hoppus sang most of Adam's Song in a single take, one night after dinner, wearing sunglasses. He had put off recording the vocal for weeks. He joked about sunglasses with Jerry Finn, and said about ninety percent of that take made the record.[1]
• Travis Barker got the airplane icon on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, despite his fear of flying. Each member got a symbol: pants, jacket and plane. Travis begged not to be the plane. Seven years later he survived a plane crash.[1] [2]
• The original Stay Together for the Kids video was scrapped after the September eleventh attacks. It showed a house being demolished by a wrecking ball. The band and label felt the imagery was too close to the collapse of the World Trade Center, so it was reshot.[1]
• The First Date video was inspired by Tom watching a Bee Gees documentary. He called Mark, amazed by their hair and clothes. The video set the band in 1974 as hippies in a Volkswagen van, though it was filmed in British Columbia.[1]
• For Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, the studio rented the snare drum Guns N' Roses used on November Rain. The Tama snare was nicknamed Big Red. It was also the last Blink-182 album recorded on analogue tape.[1]
• The a cappella ending of Feeling This happened by accident. An engineer faded out the music on a rough mix but forgot to fade the vocals. Mark, who was listening to the Beach Boys at the time, loved it, so it stayed.[1]
• Mark Hoppus played a vintage bass bought from a Liverpool shop where the Beatles had bought their gear. He used it on the untitled 2003 album, recorded in a rented mansion stuffed with more than seventy guitars.[1]
• The band +44 took its name from the international dialing code for the United Kingdom. Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker first talked about making music together without Tom while in Britain.[1]
• Mark Hoppus once told his record store boss he spent weekends working with disabled children, to cover for gigs. Mark had told his record store manager that he worked with mentally disabled children in Ridgecrest, to cover for gigs with his old band. The manager grew suspicious and stopped giving him weekends off.[1]
• In the Aquabats, Travis Barker was nicknamed Baron Von Tito, and none of the members remember why. He picked up the name while drumming for the costumed ska band in the mid nineties. None of the members can recall where it came from.[1]
• Before the 2008 crash, Travis's ex-wife declined a seat on the plane because of a strange feeling. Travis had invited Shanna Moakler, but she said she did not want to leave their children. He offered the free seat to his friend Che Still, who died in the crash.[1]
• After the crash, Travis Barker did not fly for almost thirteen years, touring Europe by ocean liner instead. He finally boarded a plane in August 2021, flying from Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas with Kourtney Kardashian.[1] [2]
• Tom DeLonge's company released UFO videos that the Pentagon later officially declassified. To the Stars published three military videos in 2017. In April 2020 the Pentagon formally declassified them.[1] [2]
• Nine is the band's eighth album, but Mark and Travis count Buddha as the first, making it their ninth. Mark also noted that nine is the number of universal love. The album cover was painted by graffiti artist RISK.[1]
• Mark Hoppus's Banksy painting sold for about five point four million dollars in 2025. Crude Oil, a Banksy take on Jack Vettriano's The Singing Butler, had hung over the family breakfast table in London. Part of the proceeds went to a children's hospital, cancer research and wildfire relief.[1] [2] [3]
• As of 2023, original Blink-182 drummer Scott Raynor was working as a San Diego police officer. After leaving the band he played in several groups, volunteered with a charity for homeless youth, and in 2003 even had to debunk an internet hoax claiming he had been shot dead.[1]
• All the Small Things became the goal song of the Colorado Avalanche hockey team in 2019. The song has become a cross generational staple, from karaoke bars to sports arenas.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

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