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‘I thought I was going to die – and it was so freeing’: Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus on stardom, breakups and surviving cancer

His gleefully puerile take on punk brought him fame, an art collection and a Beverly Hills mansion – then the band split and he was diagnosed with lymphoma. How did he bounce back?

Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby’sThe fact that he noticed – and seems delighted – that his swimming pool looks a bit like a penis fits entirely with the band’s take on pop-punk, which amped up the pop quotient and the goofy sense of humour that, as he points out, underpinned American punk from the start. Nonetheless, Hoppus appears to have been happy enough – until his parents divorced, an event that seems to have lit the blue touchpaper on a series of chronic mental health problems, from depression and anxiety to a germophobia that became so pronounced that he took to holding his breath when meeting fans. He had been “a good kid” – although there is something telling about the fact that the one time he got in trouble was for singing “jingle bells, Batman smells” during a nativity play – but school swiftly went by the wayside, in favour of life as a “godless miscreant skate rat”.

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