Green Day take us back in time with latest live album assembled from the BBC archives

: by Joe Sharratt; in Reviews; on 14 January 2022

In the career of Green Day, there are many defining moments, a roll call of defining tracks, events and breakthroughs that propelled them on their way to becoming the stadium-conquering global behemoth they are today. If you were forced to narrow this list down to just a singular point though, to settle on ‘the’ Big Bang moment that transformed them forever and irreversibly from California punk upstarts to A-list stars, it would have to be the release of American Idiot in 2004. Nimrod nearly did it, Warning couldn’t, but American Idiot nailed it.

Which is all well and good, but for fans of the band of a certain age, or for those who just enjoyed their earlier, less clinical work, there is a sense of loss when it comes to the experience of Green Day live. American Idiot turned them into a traveling show, polished and precise in their performances, even if they tried to hide it. And that’s why the band’s latest release – the BBC Sessions live album – is such a treat.

Assembled from four sessions the band recorded for the BBC between the release of Dookie in 1994 and the Warning tour in 2001 and wonderfully free of any rehearsed patter, it’s a little glimpse back in time to a period when Green Day were still a really exciting live act, and a wonderful outing for some songs that no longer make it into their sets with regularity, stretching right back to ‘2000 Light Years Away’ from 1991’s Kerplunk up to the still criminally overlooked delights of Waiting.

Fans of the band know all the songs already, but it sure is fun to hear them in this way again. ‘Stuck With Me’ from Insomniac sounds punchier than ever, ‘Nice Guys Finish Last’ and ‘Redundant’ are imbued with a real melancholy, while ‘Church On Sunday’ and ‘Waiting’ are the sounds of a band on the edge of leaping into the stratosphere and your last chance to hear them before they did exactly that.

BBC Sessions tracklist: