Green Day played ‘Dookie’ and ‘American Idiot’ in full at an intimate club show.
The pop punk icons are set to perform both of their seminal albums on their upcoming ‘Saviors’ world tour, and they gave fans in Los Angeles a treat during a special night at the Echoplex last week.
Kicking off a huge 35-song set, they went straight into 1994’s ‘Dookie’, starting with ‘Burnout’ and ending with hidden track ‘All By Myself’.
The likes of ‘Longview’, ‘Basket Case’ and ‘When I Come Around’ were littered throughout, before an interlude of five songs from their latest LP.
As well as the title track ‘Saviors’, the trio – made up of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool – also played ‘The American Dream Is Killing Me’, ‘Bobby Sox’, ‘Look Ma, No Brains!’ and ‘Dilemma’.
As if that wasn’t enough, the group then launched into the entirety of their 2004 rock opera ‘American Idiot’.
‘Whatsername’ brought that section to a close, before a surprise encore of ‘Minority’ and new album closer ‘Fancy Sauce’, neither of which were written down on the setlist.
As well as celebrating their latest collection, the upcoming ‘Saviors’ stadium tour will celebrate ‘Dookie’ and American Idiot’s respective 30th and 20th anniversaries.
Earlier this month, the band performed a medley of ‘Bobby Sox’ and ‘Basket Case’ at the iHeartRadio Awards, and surprised fans by singing the orignal demo lyrics.
Billie Joe belted out: “They said this has been emotionless flight / Around each other intoxicating their minds / Dancing in the street under suburban lights / They stumbled to the ground without a hurt.”
Earlier this year, he admitted while he had the melody floating around “for a while”, he was under the influence when he wrote the original lyrics.
He told the ‘Song Exploder’ podcast: “I thought I was writing the greatest song ever… As you know, with drugs, they wear off. And then, I felt like I’d written the worst song ever…
“I thought that the lyrics were just embarrassingly bad. I had a few songs before that I’d written on drugs, but this one was the most pitiful I felt after.”