One day in 1995, on Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, Billie Joe Armstrong was accosted by a stranger, someone who “looked like a really early-’80s English postcard punk.” The character walked with the swagger of an angry young man, and upon seeing the Green Day frontman before him, issued from his mouth a volley of insults. In short, Billie Joe was told that he was a ‘sellout’. “I remember I almost got into a fight with him,” he recalls. “I was, like, ‘What the fuck do you know about me, or my band?’” In punker-than-thou circles, the ripples of dismay caused by Green Day’s decision to sign with Warner Bros. in 1993 were still being felt two years on. Such was the extremity of feeling about it that it even prompted one fan to write a letter to the Bay Area ...
