Tom DeLonge: "All Of This Makes Me Really Sad"

Long-serving but now former blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge has released a lengthy, impassioned statement on social media explaining yesterday's spectacular fallout with Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker from his perspective.

Addressing the post as a letter to "the fans", DeLonge makes a point of highlighting the truth of his words and explains that he still holds a very fond place for blink-182 despite his bandmates' attempts to make him appear uninterested in performing with them; rather, DeLonge says, it was he who was driving much of the change and diversity of blink's later releases to begin with.

"I love Blink and am incredibly grateful for having it in my life," he wrote. "It has given me everything. EVERYTHING. I started this band, it was in my garage where I dreamed up the mischief.

"So what have I been doing behind the scenes? Well, I've tried to make things work. I've tried to help move this band down 50 different paths using my people, or other people, and people we don't even know. I tried to put forth ideas about how we can grow and challenge ourselves to become a better band. I'm not sitting around waiting for someone else to do the work. I'm not wired that way."

DeLonge goes on to explain that his earnest efforts to engage with Hoppus and Barker at "a band summit in Utah" were quickly scuttled after it was "narrowed down to three hours in someone's dressing room in a shitty casino" — but that "it was there that I told Mark and Travis that as long as we talked, and things were good between us as real friends, that I would be engaged and work passionately. I'd mirror our personal relationship. Exact words."

According to DeLonge, it was then that the band began work on Dogs Eating Dogs, a 2012 EP recorded under the presumption there would be "no baggage", but "we still somehow managed to self-sabotage", DeLonge says.

The guitarist goes on to detail a gamut of ugliness between the members — contract disputes, creative limitations, and the like — before taking a turn for the reflective:

"At the end of the day, all of this makes me really sad. Sad for us. Sad for you — that you're witnessing this immaturity. I know them very well, and their current actions are defensive and divisive. I suppose they're doing this as a way to protect themselves from being hurt. Like we all do.

"And even as I watch them act so different to what I know of them to be, I still care deeply for them. Like brothers, and like old friends. But our relationship got poisoned yesterday.

"Never planned on quitting, just find it hard as hell to commit," he concluded.

You can read the full post below, or get up to speed with the whole deal from yesterday.