DeLonge and the Short of it

There seems to be confusion in the Blink 182 camp, at least with Tom DeLonge anyway, who has no idea if the band has ever played in Ireland before. To be fair, hotpress is not exactly helping by offering vague comments along the lines of we thought they did once, but maybe it got cancelled or something. Anyway – and as it miraculously turns out we were right - they’re here now on the back of their latest self-titled record. Much has been made of the progression in the band’s sound, from the charged punk pop racket of yore into a more considered and – dare we say it? – mature style, and DeLonge is in full agreement with the prognosis.

“It’s a massive change. We skipped two albums of evolving and ended up here. That’s what we were hoping to accomplish and we didn’t know if anyone would like it, but we were trying to do something different, trying to be a better band and think a lot more about our songs. That was the idea. We’d work on one song for six months. We didn’t want to be anything like we’d been in the past, not because we didn’t like it, but because we don’t ever want to repeat what we’ve done. We wanted to become the best we could be. That’s going to be the rule for every record that we do from now on, be different and be better.”
The old Blink 182 would surely have baulked at the accusation of maturity, but the 29-year-old Tom is happy to take it on board.
“We’re still pretty dumb and luckily being in a band you don’t have to act like an adult all the time, you have an absence of moral responsibility, but we are older now so we do like different things and we have seen the world. We have different ideas of what’s cool. Maybe people do grow up a lot in their late 20s.”
Drummer Travis Barker – arguably the architect of much of the new musical approach – is less keen to analyse matters.
“The only reason this record sounds different is that we didn’t want to record Take Off Your Pants & Jacket, we weren’t ready. That’s the only reason that this record sounds rad, it was natural growth. There was nothing contrived about it.”
So what happened?
“We were told to record. We had grown a little bit but we were still in the same place that we were with Enema Of The State. We’d been touring for three years straight and we had no time to sit and listen to music and get ready to write. No-one would listen to us at that point.”
Is it just coincidence then that, as well as Blink 182, Green Day and even Good Charlotte have recently come up with albums that massively expand their remit?
“Good Charlotte are good kids,” says Tom tactfully. “I haven’t heard the whole thing but I think it’s cool that they tried something. Green Day too, they were due a change. It’s exciting to know that they’re trying it as well. Isn’t that what rock ‘n’ roll used to be like? All those bands like The Who, Queen and Led Zeppelin were real musicians and were always changing and writing different types of music. I didn’t get into them until recently because I was just this punker kid. It wasn’t until the past 10 or 15 years that bands started to do the same thing over and over again and got really good at it.”
It’s safe to say that DeLonge and his cohorts are facing the future in a positive fashion.
“We’re in a really happy place. This tour I’m tripping out more than ever. I swear we’ve never been here before and here we are playing to eight or nine thousand people. It humbles me because I don’t know how the fuck it happened but it makes me want to be in a ten times better band and makes me think that this record is just the very tip of the iceberg. That’s what I’m excited about. I used to really like Oasis but I don’t know where they’ve gone, at least in the States, but they were a cool band. U2 – that’s the shit. That band are huge and more popular than they’ve ever been.”
“It’s hard to find bands that are doing different things and have great personality and are good live,” DeLonge reflects. “All those things are hard to do. We’ve been a band for 12 years and we’re just learning how to do them. It sucks that you can spend a year making the best record of your life and pouring your heart and soul into it and if you don’t make a good video it can go right down the tube. You need to know how to make good videos, take good pictures, do the right press and all this other shit that’s nothing to do with the music.”
As he finds himself dragged off to another engagement he’s keen to sum up the change in the Blink 182 philosphy.
“As much time as we spent being assholes then we spend now trying to write better songs and be a better band".

Blink 182 is out now on Geffen Records