6. Green Day
THE O2 ARENA
23 October 2009
Warning signs come in all sizes: an approaching police siren, calls from “Number Withheld”, the weird feeling when your left eye starts twitching, a pervasive aroma of burnt toast. But none quite prepare you for walking into a stadium and seeing a human-sized bunny rabbit doing the YMCA whilst a sea of people cheer like this is completely normal. Apparently, this is a thing.
Enter Green Day: three men, thirty years deep into their eyeliner strategy, storming the stage with Billie Joe Armstrong, still dressed like your goth cousin’s date, flinging himself around like a possessed marionette.
Mid-set, Billie Joe pulls a fourteen-year-old from the crowd, hands him a guitar, and everyone collectively braces, expecting the poor kid to clunk out a few tragic chords, drop the guitar and wet himself. Instead, the little sod shreds. Absolutely rips it. Cue twenty thousand adults losing their minds and wondering why their own teenage offspring can’t even wash a dish.
The setlist was a tightly packed powder keg of fan-favourites and stadium fire-starters. “Holiday”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, “Longview”, each one delivered with military precision and a sense of giddy chaos that never once felt phoned in. It’s easy to forget just how many anthems Green Day have under their bullet belts.
Then came the covers: “I Fought the Law” and “Teenage Kicks”, dispatched with reverence and rawness that made you believe, just for a moment, that punk never needed to grow up. The crowd turned into a single, sweaty organism, fists pumping like it was 1977 and the Queen had just been insulted again. It was electrifying.
And then, of course, “American Idiot’. The big one. Held back for the encore like it’s the nuclear button, and when it lands, the stadium detonates. People scream. Flags wave. Somewhere in the crowd, a bank manager in a vintage Ramones t-shirt sheds a tear.
I walked in with a mild case of Green Day indifference but walked out genuinely impressed. Somehow, these pop-punk jesters of the nineties have grown into a bona fide rock group who know exactly how to own a stadium. Bravo, gentlemen, it turns out you’re more than a nostalgia trip after all.