Mark Hoppus is beyond exhausted. "Actually the jetlag is at the epic proportions right now. I feel like like my skin is crawling off my body" He laughs.
Blink 182's bassist/vocalist Mark and drummer Travis Barker are on a whistle stop promotional tour of Europe, doing back to back interviews to publicize their new album "Take off your pants and Jacket" (Guitarist/Vocalist Tom DeLonge will join them for the next leg in New York)
After a crashingly early start doing the big breakfast, their day will consist of interview after interview, driving from studio to studio to do radio and TV, and dealing with yet more journalists on the phone while they're traveling. After which they get to fly to a different country every day for more of the same. Not that they're complaining - they somehow manage to stay polite and interested in each barrage of questions, Even when they're answering some of them for the zillionth time.
But then, They are polite highly intelligent guys - something the media unfortunately, seldom give them credit for, preferring instead to stereotype them as Bill and Ted or Beavis and Butthead in Triplicate - except naked. "Its really stupid," sighs Mark "Because we've only done it one time for a video and people kind of pigeonhole us as that now - and its like the ignorance of people that don't even follow Blink 182 and they don't know that that's just one video and...its kind of a situation that we've got our selves in to, you know?
I Think that for the people that listen to Blink 182 - pretty much all of our songs are serious. We might have a song or two on each Record that might be a joke song, Just for the hell of it, but for the majority I think songs are pretty serious, and about fairly serious things.
We have a sense of humor when we're on stage, and we diffidently a sense of humor in our every day lives, but we try to write the best songs we possibly can - and some - times people focus too much on the joke songs I think.

Tales From Beneath Your Mom
Another weird misconception about the band is that they somehow arrived out of nowhere as a platinum major selling act, an idea which ignores the years of dues paying and van touring that got them there. Marks younger sister is writing a book about Blinks earlier days.
"Its called Tales From Beneath Your Mom" and my sister actually came out on tour with us for six weeks back in the old days, when we used to sleep in the van and on peoples floors. She came out with us and sold our shirts at the gigs, so she is more qualified than anybody to write about the history of Blink 182 - shes also the one that introduced me to Tom.
She's got a free rein, she knows what happened back in the day, and the things we did in the beginning are the things that made us what we our now, im not ashamed of anything that's happened with our band.
Mark had first got addicted to punk through hearing the Descendents. "I was 15 and i was just completely blown away I mean here was a punk band that sang melodic songs that I could sing along with, and with subject matter that I actually Cared about - which was my friends, and girls, and food, and problems with my parents - just things you can relate to teenager. All the punk rock that I'd heard before that was really super angry punk , Very political and thrashy, not something I was into and when I heard the Descendents it was so cool I just knew that was the perfect band, pretty much.
Did he ever think his own band would take off in the way it has? Oh No Not at all! When we first started the band, our biggest ambition in the whole world was to get a record in the stores - I mean that was as big as we thought wed get: to actually get a record in stores, you know?. Several million records in several million stores later, some things still haven't changed at all. "I love punk rock music - Its pretty much all that I listen to and all that I care about , I love the punk rock tradition, I love the freedom that it allows musicians, and I love the freedom it allows the listener, and I want everybody to hear it and to love it as much as I do, I guess.
To this end, Blink are determined to help up-and-coming bands It feels like its our responsibility now that we've been lucky enough to get some success. The only way we've gotten to the point that we're at is that when we were starting off, bands Like Pennywise and lagwagon and NOFX would help us out, and put us on shows and tours. Now that we've kind of come up, its time for us to help out bands like the Ataris and New Found Glory and the Next generation of punk rock thats going to keep it alive and carry on the tradition, You Know?