It's over Breaking Up is Hard to Do: The big perspective on Blink-182’s bust-up
From Pixies to Girls to The White Stripes, Euan L Davidson rounds up the weird and hard-to-grasp world of band splits.
There’s not much worse than your favourite band splitting up. Well, that’s a lie, there are loads of things. Awful stuff like hurricanes, death, burning your tongue and filling out forms. As it goes, however, seeing the musicians you adore falling out with each other, airing their secrets through the media and the courts, becoming distorted versions of the quasi-deities you thought they were… it’s bad. Real bad.
Examples of this include, most pertinently, the fall-out between Tom DeLonge and the rest of Blink 182, a band permanently buried into the spectre of the late 90s/early 2000s. An optimistic time of New Labour, American Pie and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where every blockbuster film soundtrack was a combination of ska and pop punk and Top of the Pops still existed. While the American Pie films may have become awful spin-offs-upon-spin-offs, Tony Blair turned out a war criminal and Tony Hawk… well, actually Tony Hawk never really let anyone down, the reunited Blink 182 took people back to that nostalgic place, earnestly offering new material. They were a band that had come back from your childhood to be part of the present, the dick jokes and three-chord tunes intact. That’s no more, however, as this week they spectacularly imploded, with ambiguous half-truths and details of bizarre inter-band relationships emerging in the press. It was a bit like bringing your speed-obsessed friend out of remission; sure they’re fun again, but eventually you’re going to remember why you had that intervention in the first place.
Blink weren’t the first, and not necessarily the worst. Here are some other bands who have split up and either tried to recreate the magic, or left fans wanting more.
Read More
Liam Gallagher, Lana Del Rey, Fred again.. and more to headline Reading & Leeds 2024
The huge twinned festivals will each have six headline acts across two main stages.
23rd November 2023, 6:58pm
blink-182 - ONE MORE TIME…
4 Stars
20th October 2023, 8:00am
Iconic pop-punk trio Blink-182 make a celebratory return to The O2 for a night of naughty nostalgia
Tom, Mark and Travis' return to London is a poignant, joyful, and - at times - ramshackle night to remember.
13th October 2023, 4:46pm
blink-182 share new single ‘One More Time’ & confirm new album
The trio's first new record together since Tom Delonge rejoined the band is due out next month.
22nd September 2023, 12:33pm
Popular right now
Featuring King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, IDLES, Tkay Maidza, Sleater-Kinney and more.