There are certain days in a person’s life they’ll always remember. The day they got married. The day their first child was born. The day they were diagnosed with cancer – and the day they accidentally shared that news with 1.6 million people. That last one is admittedly quite niche, applicable to perhaps only one person: Mark Hoppus, bassist and vocalist of pop-punk legends Blink-182.
“It was my third round of chemo and every time I’d go, I’d try and post something on Instagram to my close friends and family to say, ‘Let’s kick cancer’s ass’ or whatever,’” Hoppus says now. “They had just given me a giant shot of Benadryl to start the infusion, and I was starting to fall asleep, so I posted the photo and then woke up to my phone blowing up with messages.”
The photo – of Hoppus strapped into a doctor’s chair captioned “one cancer treatment please!” – had not been sent to a select group of close pals, but to nearly 2 million strangers on Instagram. “F***,” he thought, deleting it. “I hope no one saw that.” Everyone had, in fact, seen it and within a few hours, Hoppus was on his way home, pulled over on the side of the road drafting a statement on his phone.
“I’m dying. I’m sweating. I feel like s***, but I type something and send it to the radio station,” he says. “I get back in the car and instantly it’s on the radio. I’m listening to my words read back to me, thinking: Oh my God, this is my f***ing eulogy.”
Anyone familiar with Blink-182’s slick brand of pop-punk will see the incongruity here. Barrelling out of southern California’s Nineties punk scene on their skateboards, the trio made their name on phallic jokes and quintuple-platinum songs with titles like “What’s My Age Again?” and “F*** a Dog” – energetic and goofy tracks about life as a teenage boy. Hot chicks. Annoying parents. Arrested development.
Cancer, death, getting old? So not Blink-182.
And yet there Hoppus was, coming up to 50, with Stage 4A diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. “I hadn’t told anybody because I thought people would find out I was sick and they’d laugh or they’d think I deserved it,” he says. “I thought I deserved it. I’d been so blessed. Our band get to do things no bands ever get to do. I have an awesome wife and an incredible kid. Of course, the other shoe is going to drop.” When he heard the diagnosis, Hoppus thought: “OK this is my time. I’ve been lucky for so long and now I’m supposed to die.”
Happily, that’s not how things transpired. Four years later, Hoppus is cancer-free and in London as part of his book tour. It’s a weird thing to write a memoir at this point in his life, he admits. The band are still active and he’s not going to die after all. But there’s plenty still to cover, and Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir does it all – sparing no details when it comes to the cancer, the breakups, and the world-conquering tours.
At 53, Hoppus still looks the part of an impish slacker. His hair, which fell out during chemotherapy, is back with a bang – not quite the vertical electric shock of his youth, but a very respectable half pipe. His fingernails are splattered in black nail polish. On his T-shirt is (of course) Ace Ventura, patron saint of silliness and very possibly Hoppus’s hair inspiration. Indeed, it’s all too easy to imagine him walking into a salon with a photo of Jim Carrey’s slap-happy pet detective as a reference.
He grew up a happy kid in a happy family in Ridgecrest, a scorching hot desert town between LA and Las Vegas, near the air force base where his father worked as a rocket scientist. (One of the book’s asides recalls the time that Hoppus, recruited with Blink-182 to entertain troops in Iraq, imparted some advice gleaned from his father’s work to an admiral hunting for Saddam Hussein. Weeks later, the leader of the cruel Ba’athist regime was killed: “So, you’re welcome, everyone.”)
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Hoppus’s world came apart the same way it does for many happy kids in happy families. The happiness dissipated and his parents got divorced – marking the beginning of a childhood spent shuttling between his parents. “I was always the mediator,” Hoppus says. “It was awful. Whether this was true or not, I felt like it was on me to keep the peace.” It’s part of why he likes the bass guitar: it’s stable and steady, a grounding force that holds everything together.
One of the best things to come from his memoir, he adds, has been the unexpected rapprochement of his dad and mum. “After literally decades of not talking to one another, my parents and their new spouses came to the show in San Diego,” he says, grinning. “It was a really special moment to have everybody in good spirits and back together again.” Once a mediator…
Blink (the numbers came later) started when Hoppus reluctantly moved to San Diego for college and met Tom DeLonge, a fellow high school miscreant who liked pop-punk and phallic jokes as much as he did. Together with drummer Scott Raynor, the band released their first LP Dude Ranch in 1997 featuring early hits like “Dammit” – a perfect specimen of teen angst, taut and hard, and as fast as adolescence passes you by.
The record caught air, triggering a chain of events that would eventually see Blink become Blink-182, pop-punk chart-toppers and word-of-mouth stars. Those early days were incredible, says Hoppus. “We didn’t know what we were doing but we had so much fun.”
Not long after, Hoppus and DeLonge ended up firing Raynor over an alleged drinking problem. One chapter in his memoir is dedicated to Raynor, whom they haven’t spoken to since. “I would love to sit down with Scott and chop it up and remember old times,” says Hoppus, his face creasing with regret. “He was so integral at the beginning of the band. He lived with my family for a while when his parents moved away, and he didn’t want to break up the band. I miss that friendship.”
To replace Raynor, they poached a drummer from a band they ran into regularly on the punk circuit: Travis Barker. With him behind the drums, Blink-182 bounced from success to success. Their 1999 debut album, Enema of the State (the ne plus ultra of poop humour) sold over 16 million copies worldwide.
For Hoppus, fame reached an apex when DeLonge convinced Robert Smith, rock music’s godfather of goth and Hoppus’s personal hero, to sing on a Blink-182 song. The Cure frontman joined the band at Wembley in 2004 where they performed their track “All of This” and a cover of “Boys Don’t Cry”. Hoppus is positively beaming as he recalls the memory. “It was so surreal, such a rad moment,” he says. Then Smith tried to make out with him. “I went to give him a hug and he leaned in and said, ‘Give me a kiss.’” Hoppus offered his cheek, which Smith rebuffed. “I wish I had done it,” he laughs. “It would’ve made such a better story than it almost happened.”
Given their success, their young age and their self-avowed irresponsibility, there is a surprising lack of scandal in this book. Musician memoirs tend to traffic in tawdry gossip and wild anecdotes calling back to a bygone era of excess and no camera phones – and while there are brief but chaste encounters with heartthrobs of the time Alyssa Milano and Melissa Joan Hart, there’s nothing that might count as salacious. Hotel parties were fuelled by hijinks rather than illicit substances.
“We weren’t really big partiers,” says Hoppus. “Sometimes we’d drink or whatever, but it wasn’t part of our lifestyle. People weren’t getting hammered all the time, and there weren’t chicks backstage. People would literally come back, take a look around and be like, ‘This is f***ing boring.’” It wasn’t for lack of opportunity – Blink-182 were one of the biggest bands of the time after all – but it wasn’t worth the risk.
“The band was always too important to us to put it at risk by doing the stuff that we saw had ruined bands,” he says. “There are so many cautionary tales out there, and don’t get me wrong we’ve gotten close on a bunch of it: we’re the band who spent a million dollars recording an album; we’ve broken up twice and gotten back together twice. We’ve done a lot of the rock’n’roll clichés, but luckily, it hasn’t been drugs and alcohol.”
It’s true, Blink-182 has come back from the precipice more than once. In 2005, Hoppus and Barker famously fell out with DeLonge who eventually left the band. It wasn’t amicable. The decision brought up familiar feelings of abandonment for Hoppus, who only realised the parallels between his parents’ divorce and his band’s split when putting it down on paper for his memoir. “I realised that it’s kind of the same thing, and it helped me understand why it was so troublesome to me back then,” he says.
They got back together five years later in 2009, prompted by the near-death of Barker, who was one of two survivors in a plane crash that killed six others. The reunion, though, was short-lived and plagued with animosity. They split again in 2015. It was nastier the second time around with all three members airing their dirty laundry in public before a cold war settled in.
Tragedy brought them together again when Hoppus was diagnosed with cancer. “It healed my relationship with Tom,” he says, with an air of hard-earned serenity. DeLonge reached out. Honest conversations were had and bridges were built. When Hoppus received a clean bill of health in 2021, they all got back in the studio and recorded a new album. “Everybody really respects and cherishes one another. We all love Blink and what we built, and we don’t want to mess that up any more,” he says. “We have a common goal.”
I wonder, then, if publishing this memoir is nerve-racking at all – whether Hoppus is worried dredging up the past may open up old wounds. “No, not at all,” he says. “I didn’t want to portray Tom as a dick or a demon or anything, even though I felt like it at the time. Looking back, I tried to write everything really even-handed and try to put myself in Tom’s shoes to understand better where he was coming from.”
In the interim period, outside of band life, Hoppus settled down relatively early with Skye Everly – the “funny and powerful, smoking hot” talent manager whom he had a big crush on, now his wife of 25 years. Their son Jack was born in 2002 when Hoppus was 31. “It’s weird because as you get older and you get married, have kids, get a house … so much of the world is asking you to be an adult,” he says. “But at the same time, you want to go out and give the world the middle finger and have fun.”
One night, Hoppus would be at his kid’s school play, the next he’d be singing about masturbating in front of 90,000 people. There was a pull in the other direction, too – a pressure to stay the puerile, juvenile delinquents who streaked down the street for a music video and performed on stage in boxers. “After Enema of the State, everyone wanted us to be silly and get naked for photo shoots,” he says. “And we were like, ‘No, we’re not that band any more.’”
In truth, that juxtaposition has always been at the heart of Blink-182. Alongside the party anthems were more introspective numbers about feelings of alienation and anxiety. The first of these was a song Hoppus wrote himself, which featured the lyrics: “I never thought I’d die alone/ I laughed the loudest, who’d have known?”
“‘Adam’s Song’ was the first time that I wrote something where I was really honest about feeling depressed and low,” he says. “It helped me get through it. Now I’m like, f*** this takes on a whole new meaning now after being sick and losing the band and almost losing my life.” Hoppus finds it a tough one to play. “I like having a flow in a set where there are poignant moments, but that song is… difficult.”
Considering their history, it’d be understandable, wise even, if Hoppus was approaching this current Blink-182 reunion with one foot out the door. But it’s different this time, he insists. “I feel really stable in the band,” he says. “I was just texting with Tom before I came downstairs, and Travis and I are always sharing memes back and forth. It’s really, really great.”
He leans forward as if letting me in on a secret, “You know, if the band dissolved today, if Tom came to me today and said, ‘I’m out. I’m done with Blink,’ we would shut the whole thing down and it’d be OK. I’d be filled with nothing but gratitude and joy.”
‘Fahrenheit-182’ by Mark Hoppus published by Sphere available now in hardback, eBook and audio £25
