Green Day at BST Hyde Park, London, review: A stroll down memory lane for Punks Reunited

The California rockers rolled out the classics with support from punk's old guard

Peter Carbery
Monday 10 July 2017 12:57 BST
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Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day performs at BST, Hyde Park
Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day performs at BST, Hyde Park

Shorts and t-shirt weather in muggy central London is normally just the ticket for an outdoor concert – maybe not so much for those dedicated old rockers welded to black leather jackets and hoping their carefully coiffured Mohicans wouldn’t start to droop midway through “No More Heroes”.

Such was the lot of the fifty-plus brigade in Hyde Park for what could be called Punks Reunited: Stiff Little Fingers, The Damned, The Stranglers, all proving that receding hairlines and expanding waistlines matter little when you can fire up a back catalogue to stir both the soul and the Doc Martens.

The Damned’s Captain Sensible, resplendent in trademark red beret, was determined to take the nostalgia vibe back another decade. “The last time I was in Hyde Park for a concert, I saw King Crimson blow away the headliners, the Rolling something or others… anyone here at that one?”

Perhaps there were one or two survivors from that iconic Stones in the Park festival, which attracted up to half a million punters back in the summer of ’69.

Perhaps they were there buying their grandchildren those ubiquitous Green Day T-shirts, telling them how it was all different back then.

And perhaps the sight of a giant pink bunny miming along to “Blitzkrieg Bop”, just before Green Day took to the stage, brought back more chemically induced memories.

The trio themselves were keen to surf the nostalgia wave. “Anyone here from back in the day… from 1991?” asked Billie Joe Armstrong, before launching with gusto into “2000 Light Years Away”.

Playing a curfew-threatening two-and-a-half hour set meant there was plenty of time to roll out the favourites – “Holiday”, “Basket Case”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Minority” getting the 65,000 crowd belting out the lyrics with unbridled passion, while “Bang Bang“ and the title track from last year’s Revolution Radio served to show there is life in the fortysomething dogs yet.

Fan-friendly Armstrong even invited three lucky punters up to share the stage, the mic and his guitar. Cheesy? Of course. Stage-managed? Maybe. Entertaining. Hell yes, and note-perfect into the bargain.

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More so than his predictable anti-Trump asides and frankly Rick-from-The-Young-Ones ramble on how rock’n’roll as a power for good can change the world.

But that’s a hoary old punk’s view. The faithful lapped it up, and the medley that followed even contained a snatch of “Teenage Kicks”, so that was us cynics put in our box.

It is indeed all about the songs, a couple of encores backing that up with “American Idiot”, “Jesus of Suburbia” and, to send us all off into the London evening, an acoustic “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”.

Something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right? Well, that accolade goes to another of the supporting cast, The Hives, and their quite incredible frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist.

He was a Swedish Jim Carrey on acid, bounding off the stage and into the crowd, firing off verbal bullets in between killer songs. Now there’s a real basket case…

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