Mark Hoppus is prodding at his phone, attempting to find a photograph of the swimming pool at his mid-century modernist home in Beverly Hills. “The house was built in 1962. It has this really cool circular design – the whole house is a semi-circle, built around the pool, and the pool kind of mimics the semi-circle of the house itself, then it goes out into a normal pool shape,” he says. “So it looks like a dick. I have a dick-shaped swimming pool,” he nods.
There is more prodding. For a 53-year-old cancer survivor, he is oddly boyish – and not merely in his enthusiasm for swimming pools that look like genitalia: his skin is unlined; his hair stands up in a vertiginous, spiky quiff; he is wearing a pair of Vans skate shoes. “I’ll look it up on Google Maps so you can see it … let’s go to satellite view. It’s a dick that can be seen from outer space – here, see!” He hands me the phone triumphantly. “There’s the head and there’s the shaft.” He has a point – it does, indeed, look a bit like a crudely rendered penis and testicles.
The whole business of the phallic swimming pool in Beverly Hills seems … well, very Mark Hoppus. A quick internet search reveals a home in his street would set you back the best part of $15m (£12m), which underlines just how successful his band Blink‑182 have been. They have sold something like 50m albums; Hoppus is in London not for promotional reasons, but because he is auctioning a Banksy from his modern art collection at Sotheby’s. (It sold last month for £4.3m, with some of the proceeds going to medical charities and the California Fire Foundation.)
The fact that he noticed – and seems delighted – that his swimming pool looks a bit like a penis fits entirely with the band’s take on pop-punk, which amped up the pop quotient and the goofy sense of humour that, as he points out, underpinned American punk from the start. After all, its founding fathers weren’t the Sex Pistols, screaming about anarchy and abortion, but the wilfully cartoonish Ramones.
Blink-182 seemed intent on taking everything a stage further. They titled their albums Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket; they had songs called Dick Lips, Fuck a Dog and Dysentery Gary. The video for their breakthrough hit, What’s My Age Again?, featured Hoppus and his bandmates, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, running through the streets of Los Angeles apparently naked, their genitals pixelated out. Even their peers on the punk scene decried them as sophomoric: “The more serious, political bands didn’t want to play shows with us because we were kind of like a joke.”
In truth, there was always a more serious side to Blink-182. There were songs about suicide, depression and loneliness, about the psychological impact of divorce on children; they were just easy to miss amid the gross-out gags. Something similar is true of Hoppus’s book, Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir, co-authored by the journalist and writer Dan Ozzi. It’s hugely entertaining and very well written, in a wisecracking, smart-ass style – you certainly don’t want for tales of hijinks on the road – but there is a striking amount of darkness at its core, even before you get to Hoppus’s 2021 diagnosis with an aggressive form of lymphoma.
He grew up in Ridgecrest, California, a small town in the Mojave desert near the air force base where his father worked as a rocket scientist. Ridgecrest sounds like hard work: so hot in summer that the water would evaporate out of the toilet in the family home; subjected to a constant, grit-laden wind that sandblasts the paint off houses. Nonetheless, Hoppus appears to have been happy enough – until his parents divorced, an event that seems to have lit the blue touchpaper on a series of chronic mental health problems, from depression and anxiety to a germophobia that became so pronounced that he took to holding his breath when meeting fans.
He says it wasn’t just the upheaval of the divorce, or the fact that his mother subsequently took up with a physically abusive boyfriend; it was that his parents made no attempt to get on afterwards. “For decades, they didn’t speak to one another and it was awful growing up,” he says. “I always felt like I was put in between because they wouldn’t speak to one another and I had to argue both sides, protect my dad from my mom, protect my mom from my dad, protect my sister from both of them. I felt like I was put in that position – maybe I wasn’t, but I felt like I was.
“My personality became the mediator, the guy who tries to make everyone happy and pull everything back and make everyone copacetic. That’s what I love about playing bass guitar – it’s that thing between the drums and the guitar that brings everything together. So that personality has been great and it’s been fucking terrible. I still feel like it falls to me to deal with things, to try and figure it out, when maybe I should let nature take its course. I worry that I insert myself into situations where I don’t necessarily have any business.”
Salvation of a kind came when he discovered the local skateboarding and punk rock scenes. You don’t have to be an expert in psychology to work out that Hoppus wasn’t looking for a portal to alternative culture so much as an extended family. “A total sense of community,” he agrees. “I didn’t belong to any cliques in school, any sports teams or cool kids’ clubs, and then skateboarding came around. It was like: ‘Do your own shit, be part of us. We welcome all the outcasts, come be part of our little fucked-up crew.’ I loved that. Same with punk rock: ‘We are the haven for the outcasts and the downtrodden – bring us your losers, because we’re all in this together.’”
He had been “a good kid” – although there is something telling about the fact that the one time he got in trouble was for singing “jingle bells, Batman smells” during a nativity play – but school swiftly went by the wayside, in favour of life as a “godless miscreant skate rat”. “We told every adult we encountered to fuck off. Overall, I’d say we were more shitheads than dicks, but I was one of the shitheads in question, so maybe I’m biased,” he says.
His mother seems to have had the patience of a saint, during his miscreant skate-rat years and when Blink-182 formed, after Hoppus unwillingly went to college in San Diego, met DeLonge on his first day and almost immediately dropped out. When she attended their gigs, Hoppus frequently pointed her out the crowd with the words: “That’s my mom – she gives great blowjobs.”
He says he loved their penniless early days more than any other part of their career; in an era when artists talk about the deleterious effect of touring on their mental health, there is something uplifting about the glee with which he describes building an audience by touring grotty clubs in a knackered van, perpetually skint and unwashed. “Totally the most fun,” he says. “I mean, it’s the fucking worst, trying to find the next venue or a fucking shower – the quest for a shower is insane. We would go days with no shower and you’re in the gnarly heat, playing in the middle of the day in 92% humidity in some parking lot in New Jersey. But skateboarding, playing in a band, driving down freeways shooting fireworks at each other – what more could you hope for in your early 20s?”
They grabbed the opportunity for wider success with both hands, committing punk’s cardinal sin of signing to a major label – one that didn’t seem to take them terribly seriously. When Blink-182 took their album to the record company’s offices to play it to the staff, Hoppus recalls, everyone except the band members quickly left.
But, as it turned out, Blink-182 were the right band for the moment. They jumped at the chance to appear on the era’s biggest pop shows; they were never off MTV’s Total Request Live. “It was completely dominated by Britney Spears, ‘NSync, the Backstreet Boys, and we showed up looking like these people who should be kicked out the building, but they were stoked we were there. It was fun, like all your dreams coming true. My mom would see us on TV, you know: that’s our band, holy shit! There were years that felt like that.”
Then it all went wrong. Hoppus and DeLonge fell out. Increasingly uncomfortable with their image as “the naked band”, DeLonge kept leaving and rejoining: there were breakups, reformations; their records started selling hundreds of thousands, rather than millions. In contrast to the showerless years of penury, it reads like misery, until it’s thrown into sharp relief. In June 2021, towards the end of a Covid lockdown, Hoppus discovered a lump on his shoulder that turned out to be diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
The book pulls no punches about his terror of his diagnosis and of the horror of his ultimately successful treatment: at one point, he was injected with a chemotherapy drug so strong that his wife was advised not to use the same toilet as him for three days, lest a splash of it get on her skin. When I mention this, he reaches for his phone again and plays me a voice note he recorded at the time: him singing an improvised sea shanty that goes: ‘I don’t want to go to the place where they pump me full of poison / And then walk around for a week wishing I could die.”
“I really thought I was going to die,” he says when it finishes. “And, in a way, it absolutely was so freeing. I’d spent my whole life hypervigilant, thinking: what’s the worst thing that could happen? And, oh, it’s here now, I’m dealing with it and it still sucks.
“The physical pain and exhaustion of the chemo, mixed with the steroids and all the other drugs, just crushed me for months on end. But it brought back friendships that I hadn’t had in years. It healed my friendship with Tom: from day one, he was like: ‘What do you need? I’m there.’ In that friendship and the love and support of people around me, I thought: you know what? I’ve had a pretty awesome life.”
The wider world found out about his illness when Hoppus accidentally sent a photo of himself on a chemo drip to his Instagram. His brain fogged by medication, he had thought he was sending it to a family WhatsApp group. “The best mistake I’ve ever made, by far,” he says. “I suffered alone in silence for so long because I thought that, once it came out I had cancer, people’s opinions of me would change. Just generally in life, I felt that when people get sick or injured in some way they get left behind, like: ‘OK, you’re over here now in a different category.’ But I was wrong.”
He was inundated with “gifts, kind thoughts, people sending whatever”. He says he was particularly moved by fans who had gone through cancer sending him videos of themselves singing old Blink-182 songs to him. “All these people who were fighters and winners, who overcame their cancer,” he marvels. “That helped. I was finally able to say: ‘Yeah. I’m fucking scared, but, you know, I try to put on a brave face.’”
The book ends with Hoppus cancer-free and a reunited Blink‑182 unexpectedly headlining Coachella, a last-minute replacement for the R&B auteur Frank Ocean. On arrival at the site, Hoppus noted to his horror that the average age of the audience was “younger than I was when we started Blink”: he assumed that people who had bought tickets expecting see Frank Ocean wouldn’t hang around for a pop-punk band twice their age. Instead, 150,000 people turned up to see them. Like Olivia Rodrigo, the former Disney star who has pursued a pop-punk direction on both her multiplatinum albums, they were twentysomethings who knew Blink-182 because they had watched them on Total Request Live as kids. It was a kind of vindication of their decision to jump at pop success 25 years ago.
Perhaps, Hoppus suggests, these fans were also drawn by the fact they would get something unique. “It’s not just one thing. It’s not just dick jokes, it’s not just serious music, it’s not just lasers,” he says, happily. “What other band can have lasers and pyro and fireworks, songs about divorce that make people cry, and also talk about the way buttholes taste between songs?”
• Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir by Mark Hoppus with Dan Ozzi is published today (Sphere, £25). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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