On the opening night of Green Day’s UK tour in Manchester, there are some seriously Back to the Future vibes in the air, even if the pedalboards are stuck to Nineties settings the entire time. Everything is really 2024 at first. Following a spectacular performance of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” alongside a large pink rabbit, which serves as the band’s long-term touring mascot, the legendary pop-punk trio storms Old Trafford’s cricket ground with a punked-up rendition of the Star Wars anthem “Imperial March” before launching into their latest single, “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” from last year’s critically acclaimed Saviors album.
“Happy 30th anniversary of Dookie!” exclaims vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong, 52, who has aged so gracefully that it seems impossible for him to be commemorating 30 years of using the restroom by himself. However, the 14-song Dookie run-through that comes next is just part of the tale that takes place tonight. The other half is devoted to the group’s even more renowned album American Idiot, which is turning 20 this year. This album is a cornerstone of punk rock in the twenty-first century and has been successfully transformed into a Broadway musical with a feature film in the works. The result is a two-hour Ages of Emo procession, which is enjoyed by 50,000 punk rock rebels aged six to sixty. It is a sequence of auditory flashbacks of some of pop-punk’s most pivotal and defining events.
Dookie’s ability to blend a chaotic teenage mindset with a hyper-melodic keepy-uppy sound helped it sell 20 million copies. These are songs about heartbreak, apathy, sexual confusion, anxiety, and hostility, but they’re sung with such vivid, catchy energy that the rainbow that’s arcing over the north stand tonight feels like the only appropriate backdrop. The eternally youthful hits that contributed to the album solidifying pop-punk as a significant commercial force have not lost any of their enormous bounce: “Longview” sounds like Adam and the Ants done rabble rock, “When I Come Around” is a fantastic grunge groove, and “Welcome to Paradise” and “Basket Case” are even more explosive than the fire that periodically flares across the amps.
This clip from 1994 has the sound of coming straight out of the ramparts of a beleaguered punk underground scene from the 1990s, with Boyz II Men’s blood still fresh on its cheeks. In addition, Green Day’s early sense of mocking puberty endures (the album bears the name of a slang term for excrement). At the end of the record, blue-haired drummer Tre Cool steps up front wearing a lounge coat with a leopard print to perform the secret tune “All By Myself,” a sly ballad about masturbation, in a Broadway-style orchestration. From Fiddler on the Roof, most likely.
Conversely, pop-punk matured with the release of American Idiot, which demonstrated that this genre could have substantial cultural influence. Armstrong looks instantly flushed when the sleeve’s inflatable fist, gripping its bleeding heart-grenade, covers the stage. On the title track, he yells, “One nation controlled by the media! Information age of hysteria, it’s calling out to idiot America.” Later, animated fists pump to lyrics imagining a fascist USA on the screens during the Cali-punk knees-up song “Holiday.” Obviously, the album’s relevancy hasn’t diminished over the course of 20 years, and based on current polling, the title characters are still very much in circulation.
