TOM DELONGE
We all come with a self-destruct button. For some, it’ll remain factory sealed. Others, at some point or another, will press it. These days Tom DeLonge just does what he wants – without consulting the broken remains of a device that he’s spent decades hitting.
Twenty years ago, DeLonge was the guitarist and vocalist in what some consider the first punk band to score a No 1 album in the US. In 2001, Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants And Jacket went platinum at a time when sophomoric pop-punk had become one of the major currencies in popular music.
Since then he’s quit Blink twice, first when his posthardcore side project Box Car Racer unintentionally created a fissure that led to their split in 2005, and then a personal departure from the band in 2015 after 2009’s reunion. DeLonge launched Angels & Airwaves in the wake of that first ‘indefinite hiatus’, and the synth-rock group’s new LP Lifeforms is now their sixth full-length. But DeLonge also makes movies, writes books and, almost inconceivably, has become a mouthpiece for the UFO-curious in a manner that has led to many unkind headlines. “Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge Has Officially Gone Batshit Insane.” You know, that sort of stuff.
Two years ago, though, the US Navy admitted that videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” published by the and the To
