ALL THE SMALL THINGS

“I wrote this song just after I’d moved into the first house I ever bought in San Diego. I had a small bedroom and I bought two or three thousand dollars worth of this special foam that took me days to put up on my walls to insulate the room so I could be loud in there. But in reality it didn’t do one damn thing! We had most of the songs written for the record |’Enema Of The State’, 1999| but I knew that I needed just one song that was really catchy and basic, so I wrote this.”

“ ‘All the small things’ gave us chills. We knew it was going to be gigantic.” Tom DeLonge

So was this your first attempt at a big radio-friendly hit?

“I guess so and I decided to take some inspiration from the Ramones because they always did that ‘na-na-na-na’ thing and I thought it was really cool, so I incorporated that into the chorus. The lyrics were about my wife, who was my girlfriend back then. I was working so late in the studio every night and she was being so romantic and understanding. I came home one night and she left me flowers on top of the staircase and I thought it was really rad, so those flowers made it in as a line in the song.“

Did you think this would be an important song for the band when you’d finished writing it?

“Once we recorded this song and heard it, it gave us the chills. We just looked at each other and knew that we had this little piece of magic. We knew that this was going to be a gigantic thing. I don’t know how, but we just felt it straight away. The video too was really cool. We had so much fun making fun out of all those boy bands and it was just perfect timing because everyone was talking about it. The song combined with that video did wonders for us.”


WHAT’S MY AGE AGAIN?

“This is such a great song. Mark [Hoppus, bassist] wrote this song. He wrote a really cool guitar riff, which he didn’t do that often, but he did this one and it was beautiful. The song originally was called ‘Peter Pan Complex’ but the label didn’t want us to call it that because they thought people wouldn’t get it. It was one of those things that, later, we got pissed about because we felt we should have left it called that. For God knows what reason, people always think this song is called ‘What’s My Aga Again?’, which is annoying.

Was this song easy to write?

This song was really easy to put together. It had such a great melody. Mark’s words were fantastic and when we started playing it, the way it just layered together was perfect. But for some reason, I didn’t think that it was this huge hit single. I kept getting into the studio to listen to it over and over again and people were telling me that it was going to be that, but I didn’t understand it. I think because up to that point, we hadn’t had a big single, so I didn’t really know what they were talking about. But it became a signature Blink 182 song.”

Were Mark’s lyrics based on a true story?

“Mark has done just about everything you can imagine with girls and on dates, but I couldn’t tell you whether the lyrics were based on actual events because I can’t really remember. I wouldn’t put it past him, though!”



ROCK SHOW

“This was one of Mark’s songs. I’ve forgotten what he wrote the song about. I don’t think it was about a specific girl, though.”

How did it come about?

“It was funny because when we did ‘Take Off Your Pants And Jacket’ [2001], we had the whole record written – but the day before we were actually going into the studio to start recording, our manager Rick told us that he thought we were missing one feel-good song. We were bummed because we thought the songs we had were awesome, but Mark and I went home that night and each we wrote a song. Mark wrote ‘Rock Show’ and I wrote ‘First Date’. Both became the two biggest songs on the album!”

Even though you and mark were older than the audience you were writing for and about, you pulled it off without sounding like fakers.

“We really had a bad problem with not wanting to grow up. Despite the fact that we were in our 20s and getting older, we were acting like complete idiots, all day, every day! We really were immature and having lots of fun but that’s why we loved being in a band and that’s why it made it okay for us to write and sing about that kind of stuff. It wasn’t very hard for us to remember how we felt about things just a few years before that. It came totally naturally to us and wasn’t forced at all.”


FIRST DATE

“I wrote this song about my wife. I wrote a lot of songs about my wife! Thise one, though, was about the first date we ever went on. I took her to Seaworld in San Diego. I was about 21 at the time and it was an excuse for me to take her somewhere because I wanted to hang out with her.”

It’s a song that captures teen angst and awkwardness brilliantly.

“I thought it would be cool to write a song that summed up all the nervous feelings a guy has on a date because guys don’t usually admit that kind of stuff – they usually just act like they’re cool, when in reality, they’re crying on the inside! It was fun to write.”

How come seaworld didn’t get a name check in the lyrics?

“Because I would have been way less punk if I had put that in!”


I MISS YOU

“This song was inspired by The Cure song ‘Love Cats’ because we were really big fans of them. We wanted to have a go at doing something a little different.”

Who wrote this song ?

“Like ‘Feeling This’, this was a song where Mark and me went into separate rooms of the house we had rented and wrote our part for the lyrics. We had a discussion about themes and stuff so that we were on the same page and then went away to write, then we’d come back and put both parts together. Mark referenced to Jack and Sally, from Tim Burton’s ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ because Travis [Barker, drums] wanted something in the song about that.

Mark was always really, really good with words, so a lot of times I would ask him for help with things, to get help with how to say things better, because he’s really smart and read books and stuff! But we never really explained song meanings to each other. We struggled with the the chorus a little bit, though. We had a completely different one at first, which was like an adult contemporary rock bullshit chorus but I hated it, so we just wanted to make it a bit simpler, which is where the repetition of the words ‘I miss you’ came in. Once we’d get that right, we just sat about lisenting to the song, thinking it was ridiculously amazing!”

This was quite a departure for the band because it’s so sombre. Do you think it surprised people?

“I think with this song were rebelling against the pop side of our band, which we’d had for many years. We wanted to do something that was a little darker and more atmospheric and I guess people would have been surprised when they first heard it. But we all felt that this was one the best songs we ever wrote.”


FEELING THIS

“This was a song that me and Mark wrote together. It was the first song we recorded for the album ‘Blink 182’ and we had rented a house in San Diego where we camped out for six months. It was a great experience.”

Was it difficult to write songs together?

“The songs me and Mark wrote together were few and far between. Personally, I preferred to write on my own and the play it to the others when I’d finished with it, just because I always hated trying to write stuff on the spur of the moment. But for this, things just fell into place after we’d worked out the bass and guitar riffs. From there, I just knew that I really wanted to scream my parts of the song and so we decided to make it about sex for the verses and then about the romance of the relationship in the chorus, which Mark sang. It seemed really cool to juxtapose those two things with our two voices.”

Do you think this is Blink’s sexiest song?

“I think it has to be. It’s a really sexually-charged song. But I don’t know if you could really make love to it.”

No, but you could have a pretty dirty shag to it.

“Er, I guess so.”




K! Facts

-Blink 182 often got naked while recording ‘Enema Of The State’. “We were in the booth singing and Mark did this naked handstand,” laughs Tom. “I’m holding his legs and his dick’s right next to this expensive microphone!”

-Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden is a huge Blink 182 fan. “Anyone in our genre would be lying if they said they weren’t influenced by Blink 182,”he says.

-Original drummer Scott Raynor left Blink 182 after a disastrous US tour in 1998. “He had a drinking problem,” recalls Tom. “It was so disturbing to see someone ruining himself.”

-Tom DeLonge was expelled from school aged 15 for drinking. He was alson once in a band called Big Oily Men.


Blink 182 in numbers

16 Albums sold in millions. ‘Enema Of The State’ alone sold 7,5 million.
30 Age Tom DeLonge will be on December 13.
14 Mark Hoppus’ age when his parents divorced. He got his first bass guitar a year later.
8 ‘I Miss You’’s UK chart position – the band’s highest entry ever.
126 Numer of times Tom sings ‘na’ in ‘All The Small Things’.
10 Months since Mark and Tom last spoke to each other.