Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge discuss their favorite blink-182 album, the band’s debut and more

Marc Hoppus and Tom DeLonge may not be flash-182 band members no longer, but they just got together for a chat on Mark’s Apple Music show After school radio. The episode was (naturally) dubbed The Mark and Tom Show. They talked about blink’s debut, Mark asked Tom about his favorite blink album and video, UFOs, new album Angels & Airwaves, Tom’s next movie California monsters, and more. Here are some excerpts and clips, courtesy of After school radio on Apple Music Hits.

Tom on his favorite blink-182 album:

Mark Hoppus: What’s your favorite Flash album?

Tom DeLonge: I would say probably … that’s a really good question. God, there are so many great things about all of them. I really like, obviously the Untitled album in the sense of the musical exploration we did there, I thought it was really … But I also have to say, when we did it Enema, it was like, I knew we were doing something right now that hasn’t been done before. But I also feel like you’re going back to when you wrote “Dammit”, as I remember feeling like I took a college course in songwriting. I never really thought of a song as such a simple structure, and it really influenced a lot of decisions made later. So I think there is a lot, what if I said fly swatter? I was like fly swatter. I would say “Just about done” Conquer Uranus.

Tom on his favorite blink-182 clip:

Mark Hoppus: What’s your favorite flash video?

Tom DeLonge: Ah, let me think. I think “Down” was really cool. I honestly think I still really like “Always”, because the complexity of the shoot was so amazing.
Mark Hoppus: Totally.

Tom DeLonge: I learned so much. Even on my movie that I just made this summer, I’m still doing things that I learned from watching Joseph Khan do that. I just thought it was awesome.

Mark Hoppus: Yeah, it was also a lot of fun. And we were drunk.
Tom DeLonge: Yeah. Remember when Travis had to kiss the chick and we were like, “What do you have to do? You’re married. How’s that going to work out?” You and I were tripping. We were like “Oh my God. We’re rock stars”, but we’re still 14 years old.

Mark Hoppus: We were like, “Ooh, he’s going to kiss her. He’s going to kiss her.”

Tom DeLonge: He’s going to kiss her. We heard that a huge argument broke out between you and me against Travis, because we were like, “Well, you never even kiss us.” And then it was stranger.

Mark Hoppus: He had the opportunity to kiss with the woman in which video? The “How old is my age?” video, then he got to kiss the lady in the “Always” video.
Tom DeLonge: And now I’m on him. Now I know what he was doing.

Mark and Tom on the early days of blink-182:

Mark Hoppus: … that’s kind of how Blink started, because we would play in garages and maybe a few nights in the yard here and there, but you would call schools and say we were a band with a motivating advantage for us and we wanted to go play in high schools, and we would show up and play until they kicked us out. But really, to your credit, you were the one calling the clubs and making us pay bills.

Tom DeLonge: God, I know. Boldness. I remember calling these high schools. Yes. It was like an anti-drug, alcohol, or something like that. Anyway, it’s kind of like that … You know the fun thing about being young is that you aren’t aware of the ramifications of what you’re doing. You can really get away with anything if you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you about it. And I always try new things for this reason. Blink looked a lot like this. Yes. Remember we played, one of our very first shows, they gave us a bunch of tickets to sell and we didn’t sell any because nobody we knew was old enough. And that was the only money we were going to make. So we introduce ourselves-

Mark Hoppus: The Spirit Club, right?

Tom DeLonge: Yeah. Here are the 50 return tickets. We don’t know anyone who can come. And he made us play. And if you remember, no one was in the bar other than the guy sweeping who was the bartender. But he got to the end and he said to me, “Don’t break up, there’s something here. I don’t know what it is, but I hear something. It was a cool little thing. , I held onto it for a few years. I was like, this guy loves us.

Tom on UFOs:

Mark Hoppus: I think we really want to know what the deal is. Because all the UFO shows I’ve seen and the Ancient Mysteries or blah, blah, blah, each one of those shows ends with, “The world might never know. We might never know the answer to that. . ” And I’m like, “I just watched an hour-long special just to get to what we maybe don’t know?” Are we going to get to know each other one day?

Tom DeLonge: I think so. I think what’s going on is you have these noises in your house and you are convinced that you hear noises and people keep coming to you. The police keep coming and saying, “No, no, there’s no noise. There is no noise. But they actually found the noises to be real. And when you weren’t paying attention they came to your house and they inspected these noises and they found out that there was a pretty scary guy coming to your house at night. And then you’re like, “Am I going to sit the kids down and tell him that? Am I going to tell them when I don’t even know what it is yet? Let me know more.” And so I think what’s going on is a lot of that. The most important thing that has changed is what I managed to do by getting these guys out of government to force the briefings on the Senate and the various committees of Congress and the Senate. And then that let the genie out of the bottle. Because once we got people out of the basements to brief the oversight committees, it was the first time in 70 years that Congress even heard that UFOs were real. And now they all know, and they’re like, “What are we doing about this? Holy.” And I think what’s going to happen is this task force report coming out and stuff. .. We have the Navy and the DOD, they all made it real. We have declassified the videos. The working group had been tasked with that. But I think it’s going to be like, “It’s real and we have to study it.” And I think what’s going to happen is that now that everyone knows that, they’re going to have to start opening this thing.

I think it’s going to live on in Space Force, and I think it’s going to start coming out in a way that makes people understand why we joked about it or why we lied about it, basically, but it was for a good reason. It’s a big and scary topic when you really, really, really let yourself understand that these machines are everywhere and they’re super advanced and they don’t go away and they do sketchy things, and I think everyone will understand.

Listen to the full episode here.

Tom also made a statement when Mark was diagnosed with cancer, saying, “He is strong and a superhuman going through this difficult obstacle with a heart wide open.” Mark recently gave a positive update stating: “Tests show chemotherapy is working!” I still have months of treatment ahead of me, but this is the best news ever.

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