Music review: Blink-182

It's been 20 years since Californian trio Blink-182 had their first real hit, and in the time since they've sold fifty million records, invented a genre in skate-punk, split up, almost seen a member die in a plane crash, got back together, survived another split (original singer Tom DeLonge was replaced by Matt Skiba of the band Alkaline Trio in 2015), and continued to tour to huge crowds like the one before them here at a full-to-bursting Hydro. There's no doubt that to many they're the sound of the generation which hit adulthood just as the millennium was turning.

Blink-182's Matt Skiba. Picture: Getty

Hydro, Glasgow **

On this evidence, however, that’s one easily pleased generation. They played a particularly one-note show, although to be fair the unchanging pace of it all was at least furiously lively and energetic. A handful of their hits were played early, including The Rock Show, What’s My Age Again? and This Feeling, and much of the rest of the set came from last year’s first post-DeLonge record California. It was this album which provided one of the best and most mature moments of the show, in fact, as the unpleasantly seedy Dysentery Gary was followed up by the expansive, affecting Los Angeles.

Yet there was little sense of drama and epic scale to match the venue elsewhere, aside from Travis Barker’s fierce, pyro-abetted drum soloing and a slick moment where Mark Hoppus invited a young fan onstage to play his bass during Always. All the Small Things was a predictable spike in the show just before it ended, but for a long time it seemed to run mainly on a reconstituted teen nostalgia for two decades past.

DAVID POLLOCK