On August 14, 1969, following three days of intense rioting and sectarian violence, the British army were deployed to Northern Ireland. The arrival of the troops in Belfast and Derry was initially celebrated by both the nationalist and loyalist communities - “We were going in as kind of saviours,” notes former soldier Tom Wharton in James Bluemel’s superb 2023 documentary series Once Upon A Time in Northern Ireland - but that warm reception soon gave way to suspicion, and hostility, with Catholic communities coming to view the military as the enemy, an occupying army no longer welcome in their midst, their presence on the streets met with violence daily. The cover of 'Saviors', Green Day’s 14th studio album, displays an image taken during a west Belfast riot in 1978 by photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, depicting a smiling Catholic youth, 15-year-old Paul Kennedy, standing beside a burning car holding a rock destined to be hurled towards the security forces, his arms outstretched in a defiant shrug that suggests, “Everything is fucked, why not fight back, why not have fun?”
That same sentiment permeates the most eagerly-anticipated punk rock record of the year. In one of his first media interviews about ‘Saviors’, Billie Joe Armstrong stated that he saw the record as a one that “bridges the gap” between his band’s two most successful albums, 1994’s Dookie, and 2004’s American Idiot. Where the first of those records was written from the viewpoint of an alienated adolescent spraying indiscriminate venom at a fucked-up world, 10 years on Armstrong’s lyrics were more specifically targeted at those he viewed responsible for fucking up that world. Now, 20 years on, contradicting the cliché that one mellows with age, on ‘Saviors’, Armstrong’s despair is even greater, as he surveys a landscape where “everyone’s asleep, but nobody’s dreaming” (Saviors), where “everyone is racist” and “Jesus is gonna quit his job” (Strange Days Are Here To Stay), and America is “under siege” (the album’s punchy lead-off single The American Dream Is Killing Me). So broken are human connections in this dystopian hellscape, that on Living in the ‘20s, the protagonist sings, “I got a robot and I’m fucking it senseless, it comes with batteries and only speaks in English.”
