Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge may not be blink-182 bandmates anymore, but they did just reunite for a chat on Mark’s Apple Music show After School Radio. The episode was (naturally) dubbed The Mark and Tom Show. They talked about blink’s early days, Mark asked Tom about his favorite blink album and favorite blink video, UFOs, the new Angels & Airwaves album, Tom’s upcoming movie Monsters of California, and more. Here are some excerpts and clips, courtesy of After School Radio on Apple Music Hits.

Tom on his favorite blink-182 album:

Mark Hoppus: What’s your favorite blink album?

Tom DeLonge: I would probably say … that’s a really good question. God, there’s so many great things about all of them. I really like, obviously the Untitled album in the sense of the exploration musically that we did there, I thought was really … But I also got to say, when we did Enema, it was like, I knew that we were doing something in the moment that hasn’t been done before. But I also feel like, you go back to when you wrote “Dammit,” like I remember I felt I went through a college course on songwriting. I never really thought of a song as such a simple structure, and it really informed a lot of decisions made later. So I think there is, a lot, what if I said Flyswatter? I was like Flyswatter. I would say like, “Just About Done,” Conquer Uranus.

Tom on his favorite blink-182 music video:

Mark Hoppus: What’s your favorite blink video?

Tom DeLonge: Ah, let me think here. I think “Down” was really cool. I think, honestly, I still really like “Always,” because the complexity of filming that was so amazing.
Mark Hoppus: Totally.

Tom DeLonge: I learned so much. Even on my movie that I just did this summer, I still do things that I learned on that watching Joseph Khan do that. I just thought it was brilliant.

Mark Hoppus: Yeah, that was a lot of fun too. And we were drunk.
Tom DeLonge: Yeah. Remember when Travis had to kiss the chick and we were like, “You got to do what? You’re married. How’s that going to work?” You and I were tripping. We were like, “Oh my God. We’re rock stars,” but we’re still 14.

Mark Hoppus: We were like, “Ooh, he’s going to kiss her. He’s going to kiss her.”

Tom DeLonge: He’s going to kiss her. We heard that huge argument broke out between you and me against Travis, because we were like, “Well, you never even kiss us.” And then that was weirder.

Mark Hoppus: He got to make out with the lady in which video? The “What’s My Age Again?” video, and then he got to make out with the lady in the “Always” video.
Tom DeLonge: And now I’m on to him. Now I know what he was doing.

Mark and Tom on blink-182’s early days:

Mark Hoppus: …which is kind of how Blink got started, because we were playing in garages and maybe a couple of backyard parties here and there, but you were calling up schools and saying we were a band with a motivational edge to us and we wanted to go and play high schools, and we would show up and play until they kicked us out. But really, to your credit, you were the one that was calling up clubs and getting us on bills.

Tom DeLonge: God, I know. The audacity. I remember calling those high schools. Yeah. It was like anti-drug, alcohol message or something. Whatever it took, that’s kind of how… You know what’s fun about being young though, is you’re not aware of the ramifications of what you do. You can really get away with anything if you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you for it. And I’m always trying new things for that reason. Blink was very much like that. Yeah. Remember we played, one of our very first shows ever, they gave us a bunch of tickets to sell and we sold none because no one we knew was old enough. And that was the only money we’d make. So we show up-

Mark Hoppus: The Spirit Club, right?

Tom DeLonge: Yeah. Here’s all 50 tickets back. We don’t know anybody that can come. And he had us play. And if you remember, no one was in the bar except for the dude sweeping that was the bartender. But he walked up at the end and he’s like, ‘Don’t break up, there’s something here. I don’t know what it is, but I hear something.’ It was a cool little thing, I hung onto that for a few years. I was like, that dude likes us.

Tom on UFOs:

Mark Hoppus: I think we want to find out for real what the deal is. Because all the UFO shows that I’ve seen and Ancient Mysteries or blah, blah, blah, every single one of those shows ends with, “The world might never know. We may never know the answer to this.” And I’m like, “I just watched an hour-long special to get to we might not know?” Are we ever going to get to know?

Tom DeLonge: I do think so. I think what’s going on is you have these noises in your house and you’re convinced you’re hearing noises and people keep coming to you. The police keep coming and saying, “No, no, there’s no noises. There’s no noises.” But they actually found the noises to be real. And when you weren’t paying attention, they came over to your house and they inspected those noises and they found out that there’s a pretty scary dude that’s been coming into your house at night. And so you’re like, “Am I going to sit the kids down and tell him this? Am I going to tell them when I don’t even know what it is yet? Let me figure out more to it.” And so I think what’s been going on is a lot of that. The biggest thing that changed was what I was able to pull off with getting these guys to come out of government to force the briefings over the Senate and the different committees of Congress and the Senate. And then that let the genie out of the bottle. Because once we pulled the people out of the basements to go brief the oversight committees, that was the first time in 70 years that Congress even heard about UFO’s being real. And so now they all know, and they’re like, “What the do we do about this? Holy.” And I think what’s going to happen is that this task force report that’s coming out and all that… We got Navy and DOD, they all made it’s real. We got the videos declassified. The task force had been put on that. But I think it’s going to be like, “It is real and we need to study it.” And I think what’s going to happen is now that everyone knows, they will have to start opening this stuff up.

I think it’s going to live at Space Force, and I think it’s going to start coming out in ways to get people up to speed with why we joked about it or why we lied about it, essentially, but it was all for good reason. It’s a big, scary topic when you really, really, really let yourself understand that these machines are everywhere and they’re super advanced and they’re not going away and they’re doing some sketchy things, and I think everyone will get it.

Listen to the full episode here.

Tom also made a statement when Mark was diagnosed with cancer, saying, “He is strong, and a super-human who is pushing through this difficult obstacle with a wide-open heart.” Mark recently gave a positive update on the situation, saying, “Scans indicate that the chemo is working! I still have months of treatment ahead, but it’s the best possible news.”

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