scorecardresearch Skip to main content

When Blink-182 comes to Boston, look for Charlie Baker in the crowd

The governor, a superfan, is buying tickets to the band’s reunion tour at TD Garden.

Blink-182 performs at Jiffy Lube Live in 2019. Credit: Josh SiskJosh Sisk/For The Washington Post

Boston Blink-182 fans are abuzz this week amid news that the newly reunited pop-punk band will perform at TD Garden in May of next year.

And that includes Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, whose post-gubernatorial plans apparently involve catching the group’s local stop on their world tour.

“The governor does plan on attending and on buying tickets,” a spokesperson confirmed via email this week.

Baker, who will no longer need to worry about all the small things in state government come January, when he leaves office, has made no secret of his Blink-182 fandom.

Back in 2018 he left the state to attend one of their concerts in Las Vegas, and he was also spotted wielding an ice cream cone while wearing a black, pink, and blue Blink-182 T-shirt, with an “all access” pass dangling from his neck.

Advertisement



He once reportedly became emotional when describing in a speech how, while attending a Blink-182 concert in Mansfield, he witnessed the band pay tribute to a veteran in the crowd. “The place went nuts,” he recalled.

And on Christmas two years ago, he posed in a photo flashing a grin and holding up his holiday haul: vinyl copies of three Blink-182 albums.

This will not be just any concert for the Southern Californian icons, who recently announced that guitarist Tom DeLonge would rejoin the group for the first time in eight years. It is also the band’s first tour since bassist Mark Hoppus declared he was cancer-free following a battle with lymphoma. The band plans to release an album together, and on Thursday released its first single, a song called “Edging.”

Presale tickets for the band’s swing through Boston are on sale now, and will be widely available Monday, October 17.


Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.