There's surveillance camera trained on the alleyway behind Opra Music, the Los Angeles studio , owned by Travis Barker, where Blink-182 are tracking their new album. For the most part, the footage it captures is mundane and unremarkable. But not always. On occasion gritty vignettes will play out on the flat screen monitor in studio A: images of drug busts, fistfights, junkies shooting heroin, couples fucking on the backseats of cars. Bearing little relation to the slick narratives manufactured in its celluloid dream factories, this is real life in Hollywood - raw, unscripted and unpredictable, with no guarantee of a happy ending.
Had they chosen to, Blink-182 could have had a neat, pat Hollywood ending to their career. Were Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker to have commissioned their own fly-on-the-wall 'rockumentary' about Blink's recent history, a canny director might have considered the evening of August 29, 2010 a perfect point at which to wrap the project.
When DeLonge walked off the stage at Reading festival that night he was, by his own admission, an emotional mess - elated, humbled, proud, astonished. Five years previously he'd walked out on the band he'd started with Mark Hoppus in high school: now Blink-182 had just played the biggest headline show of their career to an estimated 100,000 people. Five years ago he'd turned his back on his best friends in the world, now there were hugs and tears and broad smiles as the trio celebrated a genuinely remarkable, wholly triumphant comeback. For once in his life, the band's garrulous guitarist was literally speechless.
Fade to black, roll end credits.
There wouldn't have been a dry eye in the house.
