NOFX‘s new song “Punk Rock Cliché” was almost a Blink-182 song.

Speaking with Spin, NOFX frontman Michael “Fat Mike” Burkett reveals that he’d written “Punk Rock Cliché” and showed it to Matt Skiba right around the time the Alkaline Trio vocalist joined Blink in place of Tom DeLonge.

Skiba ended up bringing the song to Blink, and they recorded it for their then-upcoming album, 2016’s California. It was even picked to be the record’s first single.

“Matt called me and said, ‘Dude, you won’t believe this, but your song ‘Punk Rock Cliché’ is going to be our first single,'” Mike recalls. “Then he called me up six weeks later and said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I told the band you wrote the song and they dropped it off the album completely.'”

Mike says he was bummed and “didn’t really understand at the time,” but has since come around.

“I thought about it, and I figured, ‘Well, they just kicked Tom out of the band, so if anyone got word that I wrote it …,'” he says. “I could see how someone saying ‘Oh, you had to get Fat Mike to write a song for you’ would be something they didn’t want to come out.”

“Punk Rock Cliché” will appear on NOFX’s upcoming record, Double Album, due out December 2. Mike also reached out to Blink to release a split single with their version of the song, but didn’t receive a response.

Elsewhere in the interview, Mike clarifies NOFX’s retirement plans after writing in an Instagram comment that 2023 would be the band’s “last year.”

“That’s when our last tour starts, but we’re going into 2024,” he says. “It will be our absolute final tour.”

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