The pedal boards may be glued to Nineties settings all night long, but there are some next level Back to the Future vibes in the air on the first night of Green Day ’s UK tour in Manchester . Things start off very 2024. After a large pink rabbit – the band’s long-term touring mascot – has cartwheeled and caterpillared around the stage to the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”, the iconic punk-pop trio storm Old Trafford to a punked-up version of the Star Wars anthem “Imperial March” before powering into recent single “The American Dream Is Killing Me” from last year’s celebrated Saviors album.
It’s then, with a time-shattering boom and a cartoonish explosion from the cover of their breakthrough album Dookie , that we leap back in time to the angst riddled Californian basements of 1994. “Welcome to the 30 th anniversary of Dookie !” yells singer Billie Joe Armstrong , a 52-year-old man who has weathered so well he looks barely old enough to be celebrating 30 years of going to the toilet by himself. But the full 14-song run-through of Dookie that follows is only half of tonight’s story.
The other half is dedicated to the band’s other, even more revered record American Idiot , which also turns 20 this year, a benchmark of 21 st Century punk rock that has been adapted into a successful Broadway musical with a feature film planned. What transpires, then, is a two-hour Ages of Emo parade, a series of sonic flashbacks to pop punk’s most defining and vindic.
