Tom DeLonge is deceiving fans by saying he’s still in Blink-182 — this according to the band’s drummer Travis Barker, who thinks DeLonge should “just man up and quit the band.”
“As far as I’m concerned, no bad blood from me,” Barker told Alternative Nation. “I wish him the best in everything he does.”
Barker added, “I think the right thing for him to do would just man up and quit the band instead of telling people he didn’t quit and just be real with the fans.”
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Blink-182 made headlines in January after Barker and Mark Hoppus released a statement announcing DeLonge wouldn’t be playing at an upcoming festival.
“We were all set to play this festival and record a new album, and Tom kept putting it off without reason,” the statement read. “A week before we were scheduled to go into the studio, we got an email from his manager, explaining that he didn’t want to participate in any Blink-182 projects indefinitely but would rather work on his other, nonmusical endeavors.”
DeLonge later clarified that he didn’t quit the band; he was just focused on other projects.
“To all the fans, I never quit the band,” DeLonge wrote on his Facebook page. “I actually was on a phone call about a blink 182 event for New York City at the time all these weird press releases started coming in… Apparently those releases were ‘sanctioned’ from the band. Are we dysfunctional- yes. But, Christ….. #Awkward #BabyBackRibs.”
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The drama went back and forth again when Barker and Hoppus followed up with a Rolling Stone interview, in which the pair discussed years of flakiness from DeLonge, who has allegedly been stringing along Blink’s other members for years. DeLonge responded with a blistering open letter on Facebook, saying the group’s relationship “got poisoned.”
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.