Punk-rock patriarchs Green Day brought The Saviors Tour to London’s Wembley Stadium amid a city summer. Celebrating thirty years of the Dookie album and twenty years of American Idiot, the band had been the talk of the town all week in the run-up to the nostalgia-set show to come.
Green Day – The Saviors Tour
Wembley Stadium – 29 June 2024
Words: Monty Sewell
Photography: Greg Schneider
Effortlessly loved and respected without a doubt by the majority, Green Day came to conquer on a night set for celebration. Ninety thousand people attended the show, the band’s biggest-ever UK show. As Billie Joe Armstrong stated, when they first came to London over thirty years ago, they had to play in a tiny room with snooker tables, which made the place even smaller.
The loving response from their now gigantic audience was a sonic memento of how far Green Day has come. The overwhelming amount of love their fandom feels for their music and what they bring as an act to the industry.
On this glorious night, we got a complete play-through of each of the albums, starting – of course – with Dookie. Basket Case was an easy highlight given the song’s notoriety, but even coming down the track listing through Coming Clean, In The End, One Eyed Bastard, and Dilemma, there was not a breath saved as Mike Dirnt (bass) and Tre Cool (drums) joined Armstrong in the stadium onslaught of wildly feel-good rock anthems.
All By Myself was done in a crisp orchestral arrangement before Know Your Enemy featured a fan joining the band briefly onstage. It is easy to forget that these guys have been going for as long as they have. Armstrong is a mirror of that version of himself, which we all remember so clearly being plastered over our TV screens back when MTV ruled, and streaming was just something that water did.
Moving into the American Idiot section of the show, we got that iconic white cartoon fist grabbing onto a heart-shaped grenade bannered tall and wide by the band and the musicians who join Green Day on tour to add that extra grandeur of rock-out sound.
The social-commentary prominence of the band’s music felt even more relevant to the world we live in today. Each lyric was sung with such passionate adoration, and as we ran through Boulevard of Broken Dreams, She’s a Rebel, Extraordinary Girl, and Letterbomb, there was a real sense of attachment to each song from stories written decades ago.
Wake Me Up When September Ends could have sent tears jerking down the faces of those around, but when it got to the encore of Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), that was it for many. Armstrong himself looked like he was welling up as he wrapped up the night in true class.
It was an iconic performance from an iconic tour. I feel incredibly blessed to have been there and, honestly, take my hat off to one of the finest we have ever had.
