«This evening is not a party. This evening is a celebration.” Summary – in the words of front man Billie Joe Armstrong, of the Green Day concert, the most popular event of the I-Days at the La Maura Hippodrome. The 78 thousand – going from memory, the band’s staff certifies it as the biggest show in Europe in the career of the punk trio – respond to every signal from the singer. Sometimes a look is enough, those wide-open crowd eyes brought to the foreground by the giant screens. Tight guitars; a rhythm section that with Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt guarantees rhythm and weight; flames, explosions and bangs.
To celebrate there are 30 years of Dookie, the third album, the one that projected them into the charts all over the world and which contributed to relaunching punk; and the 20th of American Idiotthe concept that punched Bush’s America. After opening with the new The American Dream Is Killing Me, Dookie you take the first part of the show, with also the scenography that follows the graphics of the cover: the shape of an explosion, the inflatables reproducing the clouds of smoke, a fighter that flies over the audience and releases balloon bombs, the graphics from underground fanzines on the giant screens. All songs presented in the same order as the album.
The mental distress, the rejection of society, and the frustrations of a generation that are at the center of the story have a different flavor today, but the same vital energy as then. Basketball Houses And When I Come Around they are pillars that support the memory, come on All by Myself there is the brief introduction of the drummer Tré Cool (what a time machine he is), author of the song, who sings and performs in a leopard-print dressing gown: the irony lightens up.
The central part of the show draws here and there from the band’s discography: up Know Your Enemy there’s the fan moment, this time it’s the turn of a girl plucked from the front rows to duet with Billie Joe, and on Hitchin’ a Ride the call and response between the band and the audience becomes a truly secular mass, a collective ritual with fun in the sights. Here’s the third act with American Idiot. Behind the band the fist swells with the hand grenade heart on the cover, here too a philological lineup that follows that of the album. Final with Good Riddancewithout the hypocritical liturgy of the encores. Green Day’s is a show that goes straight, after all it wouldn’t be punk if it were otherwise, and which completes in a blockbuster way the one for a few close friends that the three did in November in front of a thousand people at the Magazzini Generali for the launch of the latest album , Saviors. The dimensions change, not the solidity.
