Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When they formed in California in the late 1980s, Green Day appeared unlikely candidates for longevity. The spirited trio were widely dismissed as cartoon punk revivalists; teenage singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt’s onstage party piece was spitting as high in the air as they could and catching the saliva in their mouths.How unwise that dismissal appears now. Thirty-five years and more than 75mn record sales down the line, their latest world mega-tour last weekend found them entertaining 50,000 people at the Emirates Old Trafford cricket ground in Lancashire, revisiting two albums that both went multi-platinum in the pre-streaming days.Green Day have always baulked at being described as “punk-pop”, which is unfortunate, because punk-pop is exactly what they are. Their 1994 breakthrough album, Dookie, played in full here, welded the fervour and attitudinal edge of punk to taut, sweet melodies and pop hooks you could hang your hat on.Dookie was a restless quest for teenage kicks, and Green Day’s bid to recapture them in middle age is aided by the fact that they are ageing remarkably well. Armstrong, 52, looks absurdly youthful under a peroxide thatch. Drummer Tré Cool is more weather-worn but sports a decidedly fetching turquoise quiff.Firing through that album of adolescent angst, the trio reinhabited its ache and yearning with a frenzy of urgency in perpetual motion. Riffs were short-arm jabs to the solar plexus. Armstrong’s wrist was, fittingly, a blur on “Longview”, a paean to frantic pubescent masturbation: “Some say quit or I’ll go blind/But it’s just a myth.”Green Day’s early appeal was largely predicated on their self-effacing humour — and they remain happy to goof. Cool emerged from behind his drums to don a leopard-skin robe and drawl Dookie hidden track “All By Myself”, looking like a demented Batman villain. Yet the second half of the evening possessed rather more gravitas.After a flurry of songs from this year’s UK number-one album, Saviors, the trio revisited their career-high-point 2004 record, American Idiot. An audacious concept album and rock opera indebted to The Who’s Tommy, this towering work both won them a Grammy and spawned its own Broadway musical.A salutary reminder that punk was founded in rage at societal dysfunction, American Idiot gave Green Day a way to grow up. In stark contrast to the fun flippancy of their early years, the album looked to convey what its title track called the “new kind of tension” of George W Bush’s America, post-9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.Like Dookie, it has aged well. Armstrong’s ire sounded intact and authentic here as he spat out insurrectionary words in “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Letterbomb”. “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, a tribute to his father, who died when he was 10, also remained hauntingly affecting.Their two-hour set maintained an impressive level of intensity. In Green Day’s traditional show-closer, “Good Riddance”, Armstrong crooned, “I hope you had the time of your life.” Fifty thousand raised voices indicated that that had, indeed, been the case.★★★★☆greenday.com
