On September 15, 2000, Green Day performed the lowest of low-key shows at King’s College in London. It was here that an English audience, numbering in the low hundreds, first saw those onstage pull musicians from the crowd to play a cover version of Operation Ivy’s Knowledge, a tradition that endured for the next decade. The show also served as the occasion at which British ears first heard a number of the tracks from forthcoming album Warning, the trio’s sixth, released the following month. A striking aspect of Green Day’s material in the first year of this new century is just how different much of it was from what had come before, and just how little attention was paid to this fact. Four years later, upon the release of American Idiot, many were quick to claim the album as being an ...
