Green Day and the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
“Summer has come and passed/The innocent can never last/wake me up when September ends/like my father’s come to pass/twenty years has gone so fast/ wake me up when September ends.”
Yes, 20 years have indeed gone fast and the boys of Green Day are adults now, although you could be forgiven for not noticing it when they played drunk as a skunk a small gig last November in London under their alter ego band Foxboro Hot Tubs for an equally intoxicated audience of teenagers. It was a gig full of energy and immensely chaotic, just the type to make your inner punk pogo dance happily.
But Green Day is an altogether different story. Green Day is serious business and when playing this role Billie Joe Armstrong and co are pop punk professionals, never too loud, never too drunk but also never too behaved. They walk the safe line and that’s probably why, two decades on, they are still playing concerts to huge audiences, making records and turning themselves and their music into a game and a musical. More than a case of split personality, it is perhaps a story about survival of anarchy within the industry. Most people would agree that enjoying punkish music without someone pouring beer in your head is a bliss. To those, Green Day is playing two stadium shows at London and Manchester in Summer 2010.
Green Day will perform Manchester Lancashire County Cricket Ground on June 16 and Wembley Stadium on June 19.