Skiba faced Blink challenge - but they made it easy

Matt Skiba has described the challenge he faced with replacing Tom Delonge in Blink-182 - but says says Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker made it easy for him.

The Alkaline Trio frontman filled in for DeLonge in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and he’ll step up again in San Diego on Friday and Orange County on Sunday.

And despite the massive task of learning 25 songs in a short space of time, he says the experience has been fun from the outset.

Skiba says on Hoppus’ podcast: “You guys made it very easy for me to just have fun with it and make it great. The vibe has been amazing.

“I couldn’t be more excited. We’ve been rehearsing a lot and it just gets better and better and more and more fun.”

Learning to match DeLonge’s guitar approach proved the biggest hurdle. Skiba explains: “Tom and I have a very different playing style. I had to kind of relearn guitar in a sense. I knew a lot of the songs lyrically – of course, it’s a totally different thing when you’re playing the songs, but it was a blast.”

Skiba hits the road with Alkaline Trio after his appearances with Blink. Barker recently discussed the possibility of recording with him, saying: “If we did it would be unreal.”

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.