Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong – Guitar/Vocals
Mike Dirnt – Bass
Tre Cool – Drums

When Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’ emerged in the Spring of 1994 it was hard to predict just how prescient the lead single from that year’s ‘Dookie’, their third album and the record that would propel Green Day into the upper echelons of rock’s superleague, would actually be. “Do you have the time? / To listen to me whine” sang Billie Joe; a few months later Kurt Cobain was dead and Green Day’s brash three-minute punk-pop was just the relief that the record buying public needed from the monochrome dominance of grunge.

‘Basket Case’ alone, with it’s knockabout Undertones-esque feel and radio-slaying chorus, arguably paved the way for a wave of bands in the following years with similar influences and attitude, combining punk riffs with purely pop melodies: Ash, Blink-182, Fall Out Boy are just three artists that share their DNA with the Californian trio.

Before ‘Dookie’, their major-label debut, there were two releases on the independent label Lookout!: 1991’s ‘1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours’ and the following year’s ‘Kerplunk’. Though noticeably rougher than the later albums, these two independent collections nevertheless laid the foundations of Green Day’s sound, and included songs of the caliber as the subtly passionate rallying cry ‘2,000 Light Years Away’ and, on ‘Kerplunk’, the original version of future ‘Dookie’ classic ‘Welcome To Paradise’.

‘Dookie’ sold over 10 million records, cementing Green Day’s position as one of the most successful bands of the decade. It would be a decade however before they scaled such heights again. The follow-up ‘Insomniac’ quickly followed a year later, one suspects more from record company pressure than Green Day’s own creative impulse. Markedly less inspired, it only sold around 2 million despite arriving so close to it’s massive predecessor.

1997’s ‘Nimrod’ subsequently sounded like a band reborn, the three-piece experimenting with surf-inspired instrumentation (‘Last Ride In’), camp cabaret sing-alongs (‘King For A Day’) and, most memorably, the acoustic (‘Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)’). Here was a track that even people previously more familiar with The Carpenters than The Clash would fall in love with; age and repeated plays hasn’t dampened it’s poignancy and beauty one iota. For a band so synonymous with three-chord punk, it’s highly ironic that their lasting legacy could well turn out to be this two-minute ballad.

‘Warning’ was a return to the pop of their early career, albeit a pop tempered by the preceding six years of chaos and youthful abandon. Again the band underwent a subtle re-invention, most of it successful. Here they were at the start of a new century, still intact and still showcasing their mastery of melody.
But it was 2004’s ‘American Idiot’ that re-instated Green Day as one of the biggest bands in the world.

A rock-opera heavily influenced by The Who’s narrative driven ‘Tommy’, ‘American Idiot’ was just as much a contemporary sociological document as ‘Basket Case’ was to became all those years before. Released months before the U.S presidential election in 2004, a contest which the majority of public opinion worldwide hoped that George W. Bush would lose, it was Green Day’s genius to articulate the world’s anger and frustration in songs that, musically, were easily on a par with their greatest work. It’s less an indictment of the musical world’s apathy, more testament to ‘American Idiot’s brilliance that it’s still one of the most striking anti-war, post-9/11 statements to date, putting Green Day alongside the likes of Neil Young and Radiohead without fear of inadequacy.

In 2006 Green Day showed they hadn’t abandoned their newly-political leanings by collaborating on a cover of The Skids’ ‘The Saints Are Coming’ with U2, in aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Quite where the band go from here will be interesting to say the least.