Blink-182
Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin
★★★★☆
If you are basing it off the T-shirts worn by those in attendance, some of the cultural phenomena swept up by the Blink-182 vacuum include Slipknot, Pizza Hut and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
One man, wearing a Bayern Munich jersey and a pair of blue jeans, really stands out. To his left is a proper soldier in uniform. Backwards cap, bushy beard, chequered Dickies overshirt. He holds his fist aloft for passersby to bump, cheering every touch.
Earlier in the afternoon, poncho vendors would have been licking their lips at the grey skies, but the sun is setting now against blue, yellow and red at Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Support band The Story So Far finish up their set, declaring themselves the biggest Blink fans in the world.
Kilmainham is pitched backwards with the stage facing west, so the last light catches the headliners nicely as they emerge in a thick cloud of smoke. Led by the heavily tatted, drumstick-twirling Travis Barker, they are all hands – rock’n’roll horns, peace signs and middle fingers.
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Really, they should all be called Travis. The shirts are baggy; the jeans are skinny. They’ve aged, but only slightly. Hot pink strobes pierce the stage, and they belt into two of the big hitters – Feeling This and The Rock Show.
[ Blink-182: One More Time review – Exactly what it says on the tinOpens in new window ]
Barker is flanked by frontmen Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge, who returned to the band two years ago after an extended hiatus – his second since its formation. The pair rekindled their friendship around the time of Hoppus’s cancer diagnosis in 2021, and although it is not mentioned explicitly, there are a handful of emotional moments during the set.
For most of the night though, the mood is teenage humour. Fart jokes, penis jokes and orgasm jokes are very regular. At one point, DeLonge points at a sign for the toilets and tells Hoppus, “That’s your mom’s name”. Barker is the most charismatic by virtue of his not having a microphone to hand.
Blink have taken some criticism over the years for the sloppiness of their live show, but musically this works well. The sound is full and tight, and the singalongs mask any vocal weaknesses. To be fair to DeLonge, whose voice is exceedingly nasal at the best of times, he is suffering from a cold and battling through.
Whether or not mallrat pop-punk is your thing, the track list is undeniably fun. Plenty of songs are plucked from 1999′s Enema of the State and 2003′s self-titled album. Among the mid-set highlights are Down, Going Away to College and I Miss You, which remains a beautiful ballad though DeLonge leaves his verse to the crowd.
A final cluster of First Date, All the Small Things and Dammit would have you thinking the genre might make a comeback. The latter includes fireworks, confetti and a mash-up with Taylor Swift’s We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. “That is the end of the show,” Hoppus says. “This is the encore.”
Blink-182 fade out to One More Time, the slowest song all night, which charts the turbulent relationships between the bandmates and celebrates the line-up finding its way back together. It sits against a montage of clips from their early days, and as cheesy and American as the whole thing is, it works.
