Tom DeLonge reveals his secret for guitar-playing stamina: “It’s all about masturbating”
DeLonge insisted that onanistic acts are absolutely essential to playing punk rock.
Image: Paul R. Giunta / Getty
Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves guitarist Tom Delonge has revealed his method for keeping his pop-punk strumming chops up to speed. His secret? Masturbation.
Of course, any guitarist that owns a loop pedal will tell you that playing with yourself can improve your skill on the instrument. But in a new interview with Guitar World, DeLonge noted that the speedy chord strums of pop-punk are more challenging than people realise – requiring you to build some wrist stamina outside of your guitar practice routine.
“Playing fast is not easy. Especially doing it good, and doing it for hours. You want to know the secret? It’s all about masturbating,” he revealed. “That’s the only way to do it and if you don’t masturbate, you can’t play punk rock!”
The parallel that DeLonge draws between pop-punk guitar and shaking hands with the milkman seem to be entirely physical, with guitarists usually reserving more metaphorical comparisons for virtuosic shredding.
He noted that the band which most inspired the rhythmic style you can hear all over Blink-182’s material were the Descendents, saying: “Their records are still so relevant today, so fast and so riffy. I’d play along to that stuff and try to get better. Thank god for the click track, because we used to not have them in Blink and Travis would go into mach 200. I just could not keep up – it was insane.”
“Working with a click track is easier because it tells everyone not to go faster than that little click in their ear because my arm can’t go any faster and will fall off,” he added, presumably still talking about guitar playing.
Speaking of gearing up for a release, DeLonge’s band Angels And Airwaves are currently preparing to drop their sixth studio album, Lifeforms. Set to arrive on 24 September, the record has been in production for a while, with its first single Rebel Girl coming out in 2019.