THE OTHER GUYS BLINKED FIRST

The real reasons for the Blink 182 split - sorry, indefinite hiatus - have started to come out, as Mark Hoppus blames it all on Tom:

"Tom started saying he din't want to tour, that he was burned out and wanted to stay home. He wanted to cancel the tour.

"We understood that Tom wanted to be with his family. We all did. We all love our families and want to be with them. At the same time, this is our job.

"We are so lucky to get to do what we do the way we do. We love our work and want to be out there doing it, and it was being taken away from us. We had no say in it. Blink 182 has been a democracy since day one, and toward the end there it wasn't. it was all about one person. It felt ugly. It really did.

"Tom was deciding when we would tour, how we would tour, when we would have time off, when we would record, and how we could record. One person was dictating everything...Tom didn't even call to quit the band. He had his manager do it for him."

Heartbreaking - first you have to watch as Jason Grimshaw shinnies up a drainpipe to escape the wild-but-unwise love of Sarah Lou, telling her the wedding's off by text message; now we discover that Tom DeLonge couldn't even be bothered to tell Travis or, um, the other one to their faces that the band was over.

Mind you, maybe Tom just thought the wretch-making stench of a bad idea rotting would have given his chums the hint without him needing to spell it out.

Did it really have to come to a split, though? We're sure Rumsfeld would have sent in the army to re-establish Blink 182 as a democracy if they'd asked - sure, maybe with a puppet administration and Haliburton providing the drumming and bass services at a hefty mark-up, but democracy never comes cheap, does it?

music blink 182