Green Day, Old Trafford review: rousingly joyous racket is like being in the company of old friends
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At five past eight on Friday evening, conflict permeated the Manchester air. As Green Day stepped out of the wings for their first appearance in the city for seven years, an unfathomable sky conspired to throw both rain and sunshine onto the house-full crowd below. As a double rainbow arced east to west, this meteorological dichotomy provided a fitting environment for the band onstage. More than three decades after their maiden visit to Britain, the Oakland trio have built a career that handily marries the opposing forces of punk-rock purity and pop-star status. When it comes to injecting heroic doses of “hey ho, let’s go” into vast stadiums, no one does it better.
For the first time on British soil, a pan-generational audience saw Green Day play their two most commercially successful albums – Dookie and American Idiot – front to back. With its dependably adolescent themes of marijuana, masturbation and murder, when excavated in full, the songs from Dookie were like a restorative holiday in the company of old friends who had grown distant with age. With sales of 20 million copies since its release in 1994, the success of this accidental blockbuster catapulted its authors towards the kind of fame that would spook any band, let alone one that made its bones in the avowedly ascetic punk scene of Berkeley, California.
After a buffer zone of select favourites and finer cuts from this year’s Saviors LP, at Old Trafford, Green Day duly leaned into the album on which they finally got the hang of superstardom. With 17 million sales, 2004’s American Idiot is both the last blockbuster of the rock-and-roll age and the kind of creation that sounds as if it could have been recorded yesterday.
As gems such as Letterbomb, Give Me Novocaine and the once ubiquitous Boulevard of Broken Dreams were let loose into the crepuscular night, Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals and guitar), Mike Dirnt (bass) and drummer Tre Cool (together with a compliment of touring musicians) no longer sounded like men vacationing with their younger selves. “Maybe I’m the faggot America, I’m not a part of a redneck agenda,” Armstrong declared, reaffirming his side in a war that runs hotter today than it did two decades earlier.
Underpinning it all was the kind of fierce joy that comes from rock and roll fashioned by experts. Though illusory, Green Day’s gift of orchestrating mass gatherings in a manner that seems effortless is of a piece with Tre Cool’s memorable observation that watching Armstrong write a song “is the closest thing to magic you will ever see”. One notable aspect of the rousing and joyous racket conjured in Manchester is that its shards of unease and defiance can be easily overlooked by ears that are captured only by the sing-a-long supremacy of the sound itself. The music as whole, though, is substantial. Its persistent anxieties are not diminished by having the colour settings dialled up to the max.
“Troubled times,” Armstrong once sang, “you know I cannot lie.” Maybe not, but for 160 minutes, Green Day were able to persuade a bopping and bouncing audience that problems both personal and political could be overwhelmed by the muscle of their music. “I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies,” they sang, “this is the dawning of the rest of our lives.”
Green Day are on tour in the UK until June 29
