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?
Mark Hoppus is prodding at his phone, attempting to find a photograph of the swimming pool at his mid-century modernist home in Beverly Hills. “The house was built in 1962. It has this really cool circular design – the whole house is a semi-circle, built around the pool, and the pool kind of mimics the semi-circle of the house itself, then it goes out into a normal pool shape,” he says. “So it looks like a dick. I have a dick-shaped swimming pool,” he nods.
There is more prodding. For a 53-year-old cancer survivor, he is oddly boyish – and not merely in his enthusiasm for swimming pools that look like genitalia: his skin is unlined; his hair stands up in a vertiginous, spiky quiff; he is wearing a pair of Vans skate shoes. “I’ll look it up on Google Maps so you can see it … let’s go to satellite view. It’s a dick that can be seen from outer space – here, see!” He hands me the phone triumphantly. “There’s the head and there’s the shaft.” He has a point – it does, indeed, look a bit like a crudely rendered penis and testicles.
