Mark Hoppus on Blink-182 Magic, Beating Cancer, and Growing Up With Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge

“I feel like I’m supposed to be dead,” says Mark Hoppus. “Every day after cancer is a gift.”

It’s strange, if not bittersweet, to hear the 53-year-old vocalist, bassist, and founding member of the famously irreverent chart-topping multiplatinum Grammy-nominated band Blink-182 sounding, in that moment, more like a buttoned-up motivational speaker than the beloved pop punk royalty that he is. But his unruly salt-and-pepper hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses act as a reminder that even this skater kid from the Southern California desert, whose music came to be emblematic of everlasting youth, somehow isn’t immune to growing up—or growing older.

“I fail a lot and I still get mad at dumb shit, and I still get depressed sometimes, and sometimes I’ll waste a whole day fucking looking at my phone and Instagram when I should be out looking at art and creating and doing fun stuff,” says Hoppus. “But I really, after cancer, have tried to cherish every day, every relationship. It’s made me reevaluate a lot.”

Getting to this point, as he recounts in his new memoir, Fahrenheit-182 (Dey Street), cowritten with Dan Ozzi, has been a journey. Over the last 30 years, Hoppus and his bandmates and longtime best friends, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, have been put through the ringer. For three dudes known for getting naked in music videos and making dick jokes onstage, Blink has endured its fair share of traumatic events, from Barker’s near-fatal plane crash in 2008 and producer and dear friend Jerry Finn’s death from a brain hemorrhage that same year, to DeLonge’s exit from the band in 2015 and, most recently, Hoppus’s cancer. By rock star standards, the fact that Hoppus lived to tell the tale is a miracle in and of itself. But, as Hoppus writes, “one in a million” happens to him a lot—for better or worse.

“Going back through those memories was really hard but necessary and healing,” says Hoppus of writing about his falling out with DeLonge. “I’ve never spoken about it before, especially not in public, and I rarely talk about it in my personal life, so being able to write it and put it out actually helped me sort through my own feelings about those moments in my life and those moments in our band’s history.”

The history starts when DeLonge and Hoppus met in San Diego in 1992. “I loved Tom from the first day I met him,” Hoppus writes. But they hadn’t yet struck the perfect balance that Barker would soon bring to the band. Parting with their first drummer, Scott Raynor, was one of the first of the band’s hardships Hoppus writes about. After Raynor developed what Hoppus describes as a drinking problem during those early, grueling tour days, Raynor, who was still a teenager, was given an ultimatum over the phone: Quit drinking or you’re out of the band. Raynor quit the band and hung up. “My relationship with our first drummer ended on the worst note possible,” says Hoppus, who reveals that he hasn’t spoken to Raynor since that explosive phone call. “I feel like there’s a lot unsaid with Scott, and I would love to have that kind of closure at some point in my life. I don’t know when that is and it’s not something that I can force.”

But then, with Barker on board, Blink exploded onto the scene with a breakthrough album, Enema of the State, with songs like “What’s My Age Again?” and “All The Small Things” that became coming-of-age anthems for generations to come. “I think that people look at Blink-182 and think we’re silly and we’re funny and we go onstage and laugh and have a great time, but we work really hard,” says Hoppus. “We toured incessantly, we started our own scene, we made our own flyers, we made our own demo tapes, and we have been our own biggest advocates.” An unlikely success story, misfits even of the underground punk scene they once belonged to, Blink was unburdened by the pressures to not sell out and became a fixture of the Billboard Hot 100 and MTV. “We’ve always been very honest with our music and with ourselves and not tried to act like we’re rock stars or act like we’re supercool,” says Hoppus. “We’re just three dudes in a band. We’re skateboarders who dreamed of making art, and that’s all that we’ve ever tried to be.” Over the next decade and half, Blink defied all odds, making three more albums, touring the world, headlining famed venues like Madison Square Garden, and landing the cover of Rolling Stone. They were bona fide rock stars.

‘Fahrenheit-182’ by Mark Hoppus with Dan Ozzi

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So when DeLonge quit the band in 2015 to pursue his own musical endeavours (and research UFOs), Hoppus was devastated. In the book, he likens the split with DeLonge to a divorce: “bitter and acrimonious.” It brought him right back to his childhood and the feeling of a family being torn apart. “Everything was taken away from me, but I didn’t want to make Tom [out] to be a bad person because he is not. It was just where he was in life.” It’s a particularly sensitive subject for Hoppus, but “trying to write it so that I was fair to Tom, fair to Scott, fair to people that I disagreed with and really disliked for large portions of my life,” he says. “Putting it in their perspective made me come to peace with a lot of anger and resentment.”

His diagnosis of stage IV-A diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive form of blood cancer, arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic just as he was about to enter his first session with a new therapist. Hoppus describes receiving the news as the inevitable third act of a mobster movie “where everything falls apart.”

He writes that the experience was heightened by his preexisting anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsions, describing candidly, for the first time, the panic attacks and suicidal ideations he experienced during the pandemic. “When I was diagnosed with cancer everything else stopped,” he says. “It was scary and I thought I was going to die.” There were those one-in-a-million odds again, he thought.

But the odds shifted in his favor. After six rounds of extensive chemotherapy, which he details in raw journal excerpts, he was declared in remission in September 2021. Like the other dark times the band endured as brothers, Hoppus’s cancer ordeal brought them closer together. After learning about his diagnosis, DeLonge and Barker visited Hoppus at his house. It was as if no time had passed. No mention of the past, only the future, one where Hoppus was healthy and Blink would “make the best album of our lives,” Hoppus recalls DeLonge saying. Once Hoppus had a clean bill of health, they reformed the band in 2022 for an 18-month trial period and released their most mature album to date, One More Time…, with especially poignant lyrics like “It shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out the sky / Do I have to die to hear you miss me?” Three years later, with one deluxe album and world tour down, they’re still going strong. “Blink-182, forever and always,” as Hoppus declares in the book.

“I love Tom and Travis so much. They’re my best friends in the world,” he says. “They’re so talented and smart and funny and awesome, and I love playing music in a band with them. We are like brothers. We argue sometimes, and there’s moments where we hold grudges or we distrust one another, all the dumb shit that happens between friends.” Getting older, getting married, having kids—it’s hard to, as he says, “stay aligned.” But “when all three of us are in the same room, magic happens and it’s awesome, and there’s always somebody that’s going to pick up the ball and keep moving us forward. Sometimes that’s Travis, sometimes that’s Tom, sometimes that’s me.” Being in a room together, “I feel like myself. I feel, like, this weight come off me. I feel like this stress and everything, and I can just be me in my band with my friends, and we walk onstage and it’s just us,” says Hoppus. “It’s our world. We say whatever comes to our mind. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it falls absolutely flat, and that’s even funnier. I love my bandmates. I love our band. I love what we’ve created.”

Hoppus describes life post-cancer as “bonus time”—but one could also call it his encore. He lights up talking about a recent show Blink played to raise money for the LA wildfires at the Hollywood Palladium, a venue they dreamed of playing in their early days. “I’m looking out and there’s all these different people, young people, people that have been there since day one, Tom and Travis, friends, family, my son, my wife,” says Hoppus. “I couldn’t ask for anything more than playing music with my friends and being surrounded by friends and family and love. That is when I feel most at peace and most at home.”

Despite the newfound wisdom and his new lease on life, Hoppus still feels like the same kid who just wanted to make music with his friends, playing to empty clubs and touring in a van. To this day, he’s still excited to hear a Blink song on the radio or lyrics belted back at him at a show. “How rad is that, that our band wrote a song in a fucking living room in San Diego 20 years ago, and here we are in 2025 playing that song and everybody knows the words,” says Hoppus in disbelief, sitting in front of a shelf of MTV awards. “How fucking rad is that?”

As for what’s next? It’s clear that Blink-182, despite all odds, will be doing this—making music and fart jokes onstage—for the foreseeable future. “The worst possible outcome would be that we’re just just playing the old songs, just playing the greatest hits. I want to keep being vital and keep writing new stuff and having new experiences and creating art.” Luckily for them their music continues to live on—and certain jokes will always be funny. “There’s nothing funnier than the human body. We all have one and they all suck, and they’re all great. Being human is such an amazing experience. Why not enjoy it and laugh about it?”