The pedalboards 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 pop-punk trio storm Old Trafford’s cricket ground 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 30th 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 even more revered record American Idiot, which turns 20 this year, a benchmark of 21st-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 vindicating moments, all lapped up by 50,000 gonk rock rebels of six to 60.
