Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus on death, defiance and dick jokes: “I’m very thankful to be alive”

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“There are a lot of dick jokes in it,” asserts Blink-182‘s Mark Hoppus when we comment on the emotional depth of his new memoir. “In fact, at the end of the book we did a ‘search all’ and there are 16 instances of the word ‘dick’ in my book.”

Still, Fahrenheit-182 is as far as you could imagine from the smutty scribblings one might expect from the co-founder of those once-famously-naked skater brats renowned for their crude on-stage banter.

The book wrestles with all the doubt and darkness that have dogged the bassist’s life from his broken home childhood through his teens as a “desert goth” in the sticks of California, forming Blink with soulmate Tom DeLonge before drummer Travis Barker changed their world, and then defying expectations to become one of the most successful US acts of all time – far beyond their original punk ambitions.

Along the way, there are friendships broken and repaired, pop culture-defining moments, the chance to “make out” with Robert Smith, helping to capture Saddam Hussein, a cancer battle and yes, a dick joke or or 16.

“I didn’t think I had a book in me,” Hoppus admits. “Then, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I wrote to get all the dark thoughts out of my head, and I found it very therapeutic. On the other side, I was very thankful to be alive. I thought, ‘I need to tell the story from Blink-182 from my perspective: how much I love this band, how much I love my bandmates, the highs, the lows, everything’.”

Watch above or read below as Hoppus lets us inside the story of his life, the pain and joy of his band, and what he learned from his brush with death.

NME: Hello Mark Hoppus. You really don’t hide anything in this book…

“For decades I’ve not told stories or I’ve felt like it wasn’t my place to say anything. I really prefer to be a little bit more reserved and private – as outgoing and ridiculous as I am. Talking about how I felt about things, arguments that our band has had, struggles that I’ve had, to put it all out there in the world feels kind of cathartic and healing. Even putting out the bad stuff feels joyous to me.”

You spend a lot of time in the book worried about just being considered ‘a comedy band’, but it seems like you guys take everything so seriously: like you’ll live or die for Blink?

“We work really hard and meticulously and try to write the best songs that we can. We try to put on the best show that we can, where we get up there and we’re just ourselves. When Tom and I get microphones in front of us, we just turn into idiots and try to outdo one another with who can say the most ridiculous thing. At the heart of it, we really work hard to create what I consider art.”

Early on in the book, you explain how the dynamic of being a child in the middle of a divorce made you the man you are today: fearful of chaos, the mediator and the glue. That’s very much what a bassist is…

“Totally. The way I grew up, trying to mediate in between my parents during their divorce and the person that I am at heart, where I try to grab different things and have them make sense together, is exactly what I love about playing the bass guitar. It’s the bridge between the rhythm of the drums, the melody, the voice, guitars. The bass glues it all together and lays the foundation for it.”

The way you write about meeting Tom is interesting. He had a very similar childhood to you, you had the same humour, the same interests, then you met for the first time as teenagers and wrote ‘Carousel’ pretty much on the spot. It sounds like he was waiting for you…

“Literally on the day that I met Tom, he asked if I had any song ideas. I played him something on my bass, his face lit up and he said, ‘Oh my god, I’m working on something that sounds almost exactly like that’. It was even in the same key. Within days of meeting one another, Tom and I had basically written the same song. When we got in the room, we had the same sense of humour, we liked the same bands and skateboarding, and it felt like it was meant to be.”

Travis seems like a solid and steadying presence throughout…

“Travis is always there. He has ambition and focus like nobody else I’ve ever seen in my life. He is going to be one of the greats in music for sure. He has whatever it is that LeBron James or Steve Jobs has – someone so laser-focused on his goals and how to achieve them. I need days where I don’t do anything and sit and look at my phone for half a day. That doesn’t happen with Travis.”

When the Blink train derailed, was that because Blink stopped being others’ priority?

“Being in a band is very difficult. It’s awesome, but we started this band when we were teenagers, fresh out of high school. We had nothing but the band. We would leave for tour in a van and be gone for months at a time. We didn’t have cellphones, we didn’t have girls back home, we didn’t have anything. All that we cared about was the band. Then you grow up, you meet someone, you get married, you have a mortgage, you have kids.

“Tom, at the time, wanted to be home with his wife and daughter. Travis and I were like, ‘Well, we love our wives and kids, but we want to be on the road’. There was a friction. If you think about the people that you were friends with in high school, are you still friends with them in your thirties? Do you still have the same goals and dreams? That point of friction is when the band broke up for the first time.”

There’s a point when Tom starts talking about side projects, and you ask, ‘Why would you want to do anything apart from Blink? Blink is life!’

“That was one of the things that I had to come to terms with and understand. I always thought that everything I did creatively and musically would be with Blink-182. Travis was always committed, but then he would go and work with bands like Transplants or Expensive Taste. When Tom went off to do something musically without me for the first time [for Box Car Racer], that was a little strange. I felt hurt by that and didn’t understand it, but then when he enlisted Travis and our management and agents, I felt really left out.

“That left me with an identity crisis of, ‘If Tom wants to do a whole different band with Travis, then what am I in this equation?’ It took me a long time to come to terms with that. It was hard, but we’re all on the other side of it now.”

Blink-182 live at Reading 2024, photo by Andy Ford

You have your own accents musically, too. There’s a point at the start of the book where you say that decades later, you still don’t think you have a good technique. That’s not fair – you’re a great bassist! At school, kids playing bass either wanted to be Mark Hoppus or Flea.

“Oh wow, that’s a huge compliment. I think I’m a good bassist. I think I write really cool bass parts, but as far as being able to run scales and things like that, I don’t have that technical ability. I have an ear for what helps a song, and I can play well live and put it all together.”

But Simon Gallup from The Cure was ‘the one’ for you?

“Simon Gallup was the one. When I heard The Cure for the first time, it was ‘Just Like Heaven’ on ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’ and it changed my life. Listening to The Cure made me want to play bass. Simon Gallup had these amazing bass lines, and he always looked so cool with his head down, his hair up, just rocking out: rock god.”

Then you became close with Robert Smith – maybe a little too close?

“It’s been a dream to grow up idolising The Cure. I could sing you every single lyric from ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ up through ‘Bloodflowers’ word for word. Having Robert Smith on one of our songs [‘All Of This’ from 2003’s self-titled] and then performing with him and having him know who our band was has been beyond compare.”

Take us back to that night: you’re face-to-face with Robert Smith, post-Wembley, he’s inching closer and closer…

“It was awesome! It was so cool. We’d played Wembley and Robert Smith had come out and sung ‘All Of This’ live with us. Playing in London, at Wembley, sold-out show, Robert Smith is on stage with us, we also covered ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ with him, we were hanging out backstage, and I went over to give him a hug and say thank you and that this meant the world to me. I went to give him a hug, and he tried to kiss me. I backed off, and he was like, ‘No, do it properly!’

“I was holding my wife’s hand in a packed room. I was like, ‘Nah!’ We were driving away, and my wife was like, ‘What a dream come true for you. What’s wrong? Why are you acting so weird?’ I was like, ‘Did you not just see Robert Smith try and kiss me?’ I was thinking, ‘Did that just happen?’

“I was laying in bed at the hotel until the wee hours of the morning, and I called up my drum tech. He answers the phone, just laughing. ‘So you saw that, right?’ ‘Robert Smith trying to kiss you? Oh, I saw that!’ Looking back, I wish I had done it. It would have been a much better story than, ‘It almost happened!’”

There are so many, ‘Holy shit, we made it moments’ in the book. Whether that’s playing that first house party, getting onto NOFX’s bus for the first time, Robert Smith making out with you – but they all seem to be on the same level to you?

“When we started Blink, our biggest goal in the whole world was to sell out a small club in San Diego called Soma. The big time of playing the big room there was 1,200 people. When we sold out that room in 1995, I thought we’d made it by playing the biggest punk rock club in our hometown. What else is there?

“Then you go on and get signed to a label, then a major label, then you have your song on the radio, then you’re playing larger venues. Last year, we were selling out stadiums in Los Angeles, Boston and New York. I’m like, ‘Holy hell, this is our band that we started in Tom’s garage’.”

Then by 2002, Green Day were opening for you on the Pop Disaster Tour.

“That was very strange because I grew up listening to Green Day. I literally waited for the day that ‘Dookie’ [1994] came out, and I was in line waiting to buy it. I was a huge fan, then we’re touring with them, but it was a weird thing where Green Day were dipping at the time and Blink were ascendent. We were billed as co-headliners, but Blink were closing every night, and that was a strange sensation for us. Headlining over your idols is a little strange.”

You describe a little tension in the book, but was it more of a friendly competition?

“Yeah, at least for us it was. We showed up, we thought we were cool, we had a Number One record [‘Take Off Your Pants And Jacket’], we were the first punk band to ever have a Number One record, Green Day were on their way down for a little bit. We walked in thinking we were hot shit and Green Day walked in ready to fight – musically of course, they were super cool to us the whole time.

“My wife and Billie [Joe Armstrong]’s wife were great friends. Billie was super nice to us. Then, when it came time to get on stage… It’s like athletes: we could be on different teams, but when we get on the field we’re going to try and kick your ass.”

“We didn’t come with that attitude, but they did. They blew us off the stage the first few nights and we were like, ‘Oh shit, we have to up our game’. Then it was this battle back-and-forth about who could put on the better show and who could win people over. It definitely made us a better band. I think I inspired them so much they were like, ‘We have to kill Blink-182 with an awesome album called ‘American Idiot’.”

As well as ‘American Idiot’, you also take credit for the capture of Saddam Hussein.

“I did, I saved the world from Saddam Hussein. We were performing for the troops in the Middle East, and we were on an aircraft carrier. We performed in the hanger in the Persian Gulf while we were at war, then I was sitting down with the admiral of the fleet after dinner before we went on stage, and I told him, ‘Hey, I have an idea of how we can capture Saddam Hussein’.

“He laughed at me, but then I said, ‘I’ve had this idea: you kind of know where’s he’s at, he’s releasing these video tapes to his followers with a flag up behind him where he’d say, ‘Rise up to these American dogs!’ or whatever’. I said, ‘If you have an idea of where he might be, why don’t you fly drones or aircraft in grid patterns, blasting as time code as loud as you can above the range of human hearing but within the dynamic range that would get captured on a video cassette. Then when he releases his video cassette, you can take the audio portion and extract the time code and triangulate where he might be’.

“Then the admiral looks at me like, ‘What the hell?’ Then he says, ‘I’m actually meeting at the Pentagon with the Joint Chiefs of Staff next week and I might bring up your idea’. Then, four months later, they had captured Saddam Hussein, so it must have been me.”

Where’s your statue?

“You know, I don’t need that. Just knowing that I saved the world is medal enough.”

You wrote that you’ll be remembered for a few things: the ‘Go trig boy’ line from American Pie, being the naked band from ‘What’s My Age Again?’, and being the guy who accidentally told the world he had cancer on Instagram…

“Yeah, so I had cancer. That happened. The reason I didn’t tell anyone that I was sick was because I thought for sure that people would laugh at me because I’d been lucky for so long. Our band had gotten to do things that no band gets to do, we’re on the radio, selling out huge shows, Number One albums, every single dream that our band had came true. I had an awesome wife, an incredible son, and I had been fortunate for way too long. Of course, the bill is going to come due, and that was going to be cancer. I thought people were going to say, ‘You deserve it.’ That’s kind of how I felt as well.

“Then, when I posted that and it went out to the world, the outpouring of love that I got from strangers, people on the internet, people that I had been friends with and fallen out with all hit me up. Tom had quit the band, and I hadn’t talked to him for five years, and he hit me up – not about cancer but about a video he was filming, so I was like, ‘Oh, by the way, I have cancer’. He called me up, and it healed my relationship with Tom.

“At that point, I felt emboldened. I still thought the cancer was going to kill me, but I thought I’d go down fighting.”

There’s a touching moment where you write that you didn’t feel like Mark from Blink anymore, you felt like a patient and just a number. What can you tell us about the journey back, and what advice would you give to anyone who might be feeling similarly rudderless?

“Lean on the people that you love. I leaned on my wife, I leaned on my friends, I leaned on my management, all of the people who are closest to me in the world. It was really difficult coming back from almost being a child again. There were literally days when I couldn’t get off the couch, and people would have to bring me food. It was hard to transition from that back to, ‘I’m in a fucking rock band and I’m cool’ and all that stuff. Literally months before that, I was just a mess on the couch and unable to stand up.”

You’ve talked about having suicidal ideations in the past – like the kind you faced in ‘Adam’s Song’. Does it make you feel differently about those thoughts when you’re actually faced with death?

“It was interesting because there have been times in my life when I’ve had suicidal thoughts and ideations and been like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get through this’ and spun up in my own head, making up all these monsters that weren’t there. Then when you’re actually faced with death you’re like, ‘I’m not ready to go yet, I still have a lot that I want to say and do and people that I love’. You see the beauty in the world, less than the things that scare you. When you’re like, ‘This could be my last year on earth, what am I going to do?’

“We’re on the other side of that. Now I’m here and really thankful. I’ve a book out and you’ve read it and that’s cool. The process for me to heal from being sick and go through all this pain and the joy of Blink, it means a lot that people want to check it out.”

And do you feel vindicated now that pop punk is so huge now, and new generations of artists have sprung from Blink’s influence?

“I’ve always felt that our band is special and cool because of the talent that we have. Tom is one of the best songwriters I have ever met, Travis has an ear and a sense of music that I aspire to, and I’ve always just been in awe of their abilities. I’ve always felt that we have something to fight for and that Blink were the underdogs. People didn’t want to like Blink or the gatekeepers thought that we were the silly or the throwaway band. We’ve really worked hard. We toured and wrote and toured and wrote and struggled. To be on this side of it is really vindicating. People coming to a Blink show as their first ever gig 30 years into our career, what more could you ask for?”

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give to that desert goth?

“Put your head down and do the work and enjoy it, because you’re very lucky to get to do what you do.”