As a wise man almost said: you can't keep a good band down.
When frontman Billie Joe Armstrong checked himself into rehab last year, Green Day had looked like a band on the edge of implosion. Instead, they dusted themselves off, reapplied the black eyeliner and came to Brixton Academy in the same week they headline Reading & Leeds Festival.
As you’d expect from a band who released three albums last year, the pop-punk stalwarts have a pretty good work ethic.
There was hardly a moment’s pause in their two-hour performance, while even by his own standards, Armstrong, 41, was impossibly energetic. When he wasn’t inviting audience members on stage, he was drenching the front row with a hose.
The crowd bellowed along to every song. The only thing stopping pints being thrown skyward, you suspected, was the fact they cost £4.80 each.
Every song was its own mini concert, complete with audience-only sections, drum solos and anti-establishment rants. The only thing missing from Boulevard of Broken Dreams was a drinks interval between the verse and chorus.
Subtlety, of course, remains in short supply. Equally, it’s unfair to dismiss Green Day as purely a party band. Wake Me Up When September Ends, taken from their critically acclaimed American Idiot LP, tackled the weighty subject of the war in Iraq.
Still, there was plenty of silliness elsewhere. Not least the spectacle of 5,000 people declaring, in unison, their desire “to be a minority” during the outsider anthem Minority.
“Any of you coming to Reading this weekend?” asked Armstrong later on. “I think this is better.”
It was hard to disagree, particularly after an encore of American Idiot and Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).
“I hope you had the time of your life,” sang Armstrong, backed by acoustic guitar and the whole of the Academy. We did, we did.
