Blink-182 live in London: the Mark, Tom and Travis show is back with a bang

Since Blink-182’s original line-up last performed together in 2014, all three members of the iconic pop-punk band have gone through significant changes. First there was Tom DeLonge, who left the band for seven years to pursue other projects and his passion for UFO research, which began as a punchline before turning into a genuinely impressive side hustle. Bassist Mark Hoppus faced a battle with stage four lymphoma in 2021, and is now cancer-free, while drummer Travis Barker has married a Kardashian and become an in-demand collaborator in the hip-hop world.

On the band’s 20th anniversary tour with DeLonge in 2014, they appeared anxious and disconnected, with the frontman leaving soon after to be replaced by Alkaline Trio vocalist Matt Skiba. While the trio’s 2023-2024 reunion tour hasn’t been without its challenges, too – Barker had to cancel a number of UK and Irish shows to fly home for a family emergency last month – their first of two dates at The O2 in London sees a band full of joy and giddy energy. “We’re so fucking good at what we do,” DeLonge beams before ‘Feeling This’, with the band instantly proving his point on one of a host of generational punk anthems in their back pocket.

Though Skiba proved a worthy stand-in for half a decade, the chemistry between Mark, Tom and Travis has always been irreplaceable, and the two frontmen spend the gig trading dick jokes. No matter how unsophisticated their teenage humour remains, it’s laugh-out-loud funny as ever. Behind them, Barker performs suspended from a platform in the sky, even playing a whole song blind with a towel draped over his face, and is a perfect showman of a drummer. After ‘Aliens Exist’, newspaper cuttings of DeLonge with the headline “he was right!” are plastered over the screen.

For a band with such a chequered history, to see them having such uninhibited fun on stage is a total delight, and radiates back onto the crowd. Fireworks greet the end of the expletive-laden ‘Family Reunion’ while after DeLonge pokes fun at his bandmates’ performance of festive hit ‘Happy Holidays, You Bastard’, they decide to perform it again, twice as fast. For a band who have often been criticised for loose and sloppy live shows, it’s as if they’re proving with a wink just how tight and impressive they sound this time round. It helps that they have the hits to back it up, and the last 20 minutes of the show is a simply unstoppable rout through ‘What’s My Age Again?’, ‘First Date’, ‘All The Small Things’ and ‘Dammit’.

While silly, childish fun is the order of the night, it makes the show’s one deadly serious moment hit like a ton of bricks. “Fuck, I hate this part,” Hoppus says before ‘Adam’s Song’, a track he wrote in the depths of depression at the turn of the millennium. “This song saved my life a long time ago, and a few years ago I was back in a bad place, but not by choice,” he tells the crowd. Discussing his cancer diagnosis, he goes on: “There were times when I didn’t know whether I’d ever be on stage again, and the doctors cured my cancer but I was empty and shitty on the inside.”

It’s this reunion tour, Hoppus reflects, that filled him back up after such a tragedy. “This band and this tour is saving my life a second time.” It’s this sobering moment, amid a show otherwise packed with silliness, that puts the whole gig into perspective and turns it from an amusingly pleasurable one into something special and meaningful.