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"I won’t wanna play music when I’m forty, I’d rather be a professor at a university" said Dexter Holland in 1995. Now 49, he shouldn’t be on stage. Yet here we are in 2015, with the forever peroxide-haired lead of punk rock veterans The Offspring, screaming “dance fucker dance” at Brixton Academy.
The decision to open with 2008’s ‘You’re Gonna Go Far Kid’, their most recent commercial success since their 90s heyday, shows there is still an audience for this brand of crude, self-deprecating fun. And as if to emphasise their longevity, they follow up with 1996’s ‘All I Want’, and breakthrough single 'Come Out and Play', from the staggeringly successful Smash LP, which remains the best-selling independent label album of all time.
In what has been loosely billed as a 20th anniversary celebration tour, band members Noodles (lead guitar), Greg K (bass guitar) and Pete Parada (drums) show little sign of curbing their enthusiasm. The show works because the crowd know what they are getting. These songs aren’t works of Shakespeare - they are far more important. Soundtracks to formative years of flailing adolescence, epitomised by the “you stupid, dumb shit, goddamn, motherfucker” line from ‘Bad Habit’, which Holland performs atop a speaker. Looking out over the mayhem, he takes out his earpiece and soaks in the moment.
Reading the energy, the band jump straight into ‘A Million Miles Away’, taken from Conspiracy of One, an album some in the crowd are not old enough to remember being released, but can certainly appreciate its raucous power chords.
There’s a brief moment of heart-breaking acoustic tenderness with ‘Kristy, Are You Doing Okay?’, a song about the signs of abuse Holland saw in a friend, but never acted upon, that sharply contrasts with the testosterone fuelled ‘Want You Bad’. It’s important footnote, indicative of the band’s further depth, and somehow justifies the encore jam-packed with manic anthems of stoner boy life, 'Self Esteem’ included.
The band may be a little older these days, yet as the group that released ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job’ – you get the feeling Dexter’s asked himself that question many times since 1995, but forgot the years, failed to meet application deadlines, and realised he’s got a pretty good job as it is.
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