The Offspring triggered a bout of nostalgia for '90s pop-punk fans when they appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night, June 17, to perform their 1994 radio hit Come Out And Play.
Released as the first single from the Californian band's third album Smash in late August 1994, Come Out And Play only just scraped into the Top 100 in the UK, peaking at number 98, but fared rather in America, topping the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart.
"On the radio, with Come Out And Play, you could feel that things were happening," frontman Dexter Holland told English music writer Ian Winwood for his essential '90s punk history Smash! "It was expanding geographically, but slowly. So it went from LA to the next big cities, which were Phoenix and Las Vegas, and it kind of expanded in that way for a couple of months. Then MTV got the video and played it on 120 Minutes, and slowly it got rotation outside of that slot. And that's when it went."
By autumn 1994, The Offspring were selling in excess of 100,000 copies of Smash each week, and such was the demand for the record that the group's label, Epitaph, had to rent out extra storage space in buildings in Los Angeles just to have somewhere to store the CDs before they were distributed to the warehouses of record store chains. By the end of 1994, the record had sold four million copies in the US alone. It has now sold over 11 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling independently-released rock album of all time.
