Remaining Blink-182ers blast Tom DeLonge for “disrespectful and ungrateful” behavior

Despite all the dick jokes and funny videos, being in Blink-182 can’t be easy. Yesterday, just hours after the group said Tom DeLonge had left the band, DeLonge refuted the statement, saying he was “on a phone call about a Blink-182 event for New York City at the time all those weird press releases started coming in.” And while some diehard fans took DeLonge’s Instagram statement as a sign that everything was totally, perfectly okay in Blinkworld, more skeptical observers suspected differently.

Those suspicions were validated last night, when Rolling Stone posted a quickly-done interview with the group’s Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker in which the two blast DeLonge for being “disrespectful and ungrateful.” Barker even questioned DeLonge’s sincerity about reuniting the band after the drummer’s near-death in a plane crash, saying,

“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.”

The whole piece is really a takedown of DeLonge, who Hoppus and Barker say has caused them “to be apologizing for one person all the time,” something they find “humiliating.” When asked if he’ll consider inviting DeLonge back to the group one day, Hoppus responds that he just wishes that “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.” He also said that there are “legalities” involved with this whole situation since DeLonge “technically didn’t quit the band,” though he says he’ll leave that “to the attorneys and managers.”

DeLonge has been fairly silent on social media since, although Revolt caught him both tweeting and deleting a post last night where he said he and Hoppus had “spent a week on the phone with managers debating parting with Travis” a year ago. Whether that’s true is obviously anyone’s guess, but it’s an interesting nugget in this whole mess all the same.