Last year, the three members of Green Day were interviewed in Los Angeles by the alternative-music radio station KROQ-FM. During the 13-minute exchange, front man Billie Joe Armstrong let slip a piece of information that apparently didn’t warrant further investigation by his interlocutors. His band’s next album, he revealed, would be their last for Warner Bros. After that, he said, lowering his voice in a theatrical manner, “we’re off our contract…” By any measure, it has been a successful partnership. Since signing with Reprise Records, a Warner subsidiary, in 1993, Green Day have sold more than 85-million albums; with Dookie and the genre-defining American Idiot, they are one of a vanishingly small number of groups to have released two records that have each shifted more than 15-million copies. Along with The Offspring, in 1994 they became the first of two domestic groups to smash through the glass ceiling that separated punk rock from the American mainstream. It was a feat that had eluded all who had come before them, including the Ramones. When the New Yorkers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - in 2002, a year after the death of singer Joey Ramone - the band’s remaining members nominated Green Day to play Teenage Lobotomy, Rockaway Beach, and Blitzkrieg Bop in their honour at the ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan. It’s the kind of detail worth mentioning to anyone who believes that Green Day are not a punk rock group. Just last month a number of the band’s many detractors stormed the barricades in response to an article for the Telegraph in which I nominated American Idiot as the world’s most essential punk record. "Green Day [at] No1 – you have no credibility whatsoever" and "Green Day suck. Get them off the list pronto" were just two of the many negative responses.

But, indubitably, Green Day are a punk rock band. Last month, in Berkeley I attended a Sunday night concert at 924 Gilman Street, the not-for-profit all-ages venue at which the Oakland trio made their bones. A petri dish of political fermentation, it is the most significant punk club of the past 50-years. On the first Sunday of the year, tickets to see a four-band bill cost 10 dollars. A stenciled sign at the door read ‘no alcohol, no drugs, no violence… no f_____-up behavior.’ As I watched the impressive Kevin Nichols sing about his disappointing life, my eye drifted to a piece of graffiti written on a beam of wood in the rafters. It read ‘Sweet Children’, the name of a band of young teenagers that changed its name to Green Day. It had been up there for 30-years. “Gilman was my first real taste of what it was like to be a punk,” Billie Joe Armstrong told me. “It wasn’t just about music; it was about a community and a movement…. Gilman was the first time that I learned anything in my life. Before Gilman, everything I’d learned up until that point was bullshit.” Green Day became 924 Gilman Street’s house-band and performed at the venue dozens of times. One of the club’s founding fathers, Lawrence Livermore, invited the group to make music for his tiny label, Lookout, on which they released two albums, both of which were recorded for less than a thousand dollars. The second of these, Kerplunk, sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Self-sufficient from the start, Green Day toured Europe in conditions so squalid that Billie Joe Armstrong contracted body-lice. Playing in squats and punk clubs, in Germany they found themselves at the business end of a loaded gun; in snowbound Copenhagen the three musicians slept in a room that housed a human head preserved in formaldehyde. For 10-weeks in the thick of winter, they rode from gig to gig in a van that blew up. One night, six people pitched up to see them play. “We were in the situation where a band on tour has to lose their mind, and be able to find each other to make life make sense again,” Armstrong told me. “That’s why people quit, because they start losing their minds. We felt like we were a bunch of clowns that were in a small car.” But by the end of 1992, in the United States Green Day were playing to as many as 2000 people a night. They opted to sign with Warner Bros. after the company’s young A&R man, Rob Cavallo, impressed them with his ability to play Beatles songs while stoned. In the avowedly independent East Bay punk scene of 1993, such a decision was unconscionable. Overnight, the band were no longer welcome at 924 Gilman Street - the club denies access to any artist on a major label - and were dead to many.

Green Day's second album. Kerplunk

“There were a lot of kids that had a lot of shit to fall back on who were really self-righteous,” bassist Mike Dirnt told me. “And I said, ‘Well you can be indignant when you’ve got a f______ trust fund.’ I was sleeping in the back of my truck half the time.” Green Day were offered a $200,000 advance, to which they requested an additional $25,000 so as to purchase a new ride in which to tour. Impressed by their self-reliance, and by the fact that they weren’t demanding a tour-bus, Lenny Waronker, the president of Warner Bros. Records, said “you know what, this is cool, let’s give ‘em the f______ van.” The band purchased and converted a mobile library, known to all in the scene as ‘the Bookmobile.’ Green Day’s first album for their new label, Dookie, emerged without fanfare. The LP’s distribution was hampered by a severe snowstorm in the US North East; after limping onto the US Billboard Hot 200 at a pallid 141, it suffered a drop in sales that Rob Cavallo, who also produced the disc, describes as “precipitous.” Barely a month old, the trio’s new release was in danger of failing to recoup its modest costs. Dookie’s leadoff single, Longview, also failed to gain traction. The song’s fading hopes were kept alive only by the persistence of Steve Tipp, the head of alternative promotion at Warner Bros., who transformed an apparent flop into a staple of MTV and alternative radio. Each night Rob Cavallo rang up KROQ several times to request the track be played, adopting a different voice for each call. With Kurt Cobain’s throne standing empty, and with audiences in the market for an equally credible but less oppressive sound, Green Day’s timing was perfect. In the United States alone, Dookie sold 10-million copies. By comparison, Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind sold three million. “I thought, ‘Well if we’re gonna do this let’s make it as big as possible or else go down in flames,” Billie Joe Armstrong told me. “The last thing I wanted was to be anywhere in the middle.”

Green Day (Tre Cool, Mike Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong) in 2004 Credit : PA

As Dookie hit like a meteorite, out on the road things were getting out of hand. The opening band on that summer’s Lollopalooza festival, Armstrong caused chaos and injury when he invited 10,000 fans to occupy the still-empty seats at the front of the stage. A free concert at the Hatch Shell in Boston in front of a crowd of 70,000 ended in a riot that saw a 100 people either under arrest or in the emergency room. An infamous appearance for half a million concertgoers at Woodstock ’94 was equally chaotic. “We were dealing with the repercussions of signing to a major label,” Mike Dirnt told me. “We were dealing with starting new families. We were dealing with alcoholism on the road. It’s like one foot is at the party while the other foot is in the grave.” Green Day returned from the nine-month tour exhausted. On the Haight in San Francisco, Billie Joe Armstrong was accosted by a postcard-punk who accused him of being “a sellout” and a “rock star.” Drummer Tre Cool spoke of friends who said “you don’t have a problem in the world because your band’s on TV and you’re successful,” and, anyway, “it should have been some other band who became successful, not yours.” The group spent the next nine years finding fascinating ways with which to escape the shadow of Dookie. In 1995 they released the coiled and twitching Insomniac, as pronounced a rejection of fame as Nirvana’s In Utero; two years later the band introduced the magnificently expansive Nimrod. Tracks such as Panic Song, No Pride, Nice Guys Finish Last, and Uptight are among the finest in the punk rock canon.

Billie Joe Armstrong in Manchester, 2017

But it was with American Idiot, in 2004, that Green Day conquered the world for a second time. The band’s thematic, occasionally political, wildly adventurous punk rock opera was brought to life after Billie Joe Armstrong heard the Lynyrd Skynyrd song That’s How I Like It on his car radio. In response to such winning couplets as “[I like my] women hot and my beer ice cold, a real fast car and my whisky old,” he wrote the album’s incendiary title track. The impact of American Idiot can hardly be overstated – certainly not on me. I was the first person in the country to hear the album, at Warner Bros. headquarters in Burbank, on a stereo that cost as much as a family car. I interviewed the band afterward, at Ocean Way Recording on Sunset Boulevard, as they plied me with a 40-ounce bottle of Mickey’s malt liquor. It’s not the kind of thing you expect from people who are about to sell 16-million records. “I just had a feeling about American Idiot,” Rob Cavallo, the album’s producer, told me. “I just knew that when we released it, people were going to respond and explode. I had this feeling of electricity in my body that was as intense as anything I’d had before. The only time that I’d had it like that was on Dookie.”

“The difference between Dookie and American Idiot is pretty simple,” Tre Cool said. “The first time, the success was an accident; the second time, it was on purpose.” In the years that have elapsed since the release of their highest-selling album, Green Day have tried various means of placing distance between themselves and their punk rock masterpiece. The most impressive of these was 2009’s ambitious and undervalued 21st Century Breakdown. The least successful arrives on Friday in the shape of the band’s new LP. By a distance of many galaxies, Father Of All Motherf_____s is the band’s worst album. Once the most fluent songwriter of his generation, in 2020 Billie Joe Armstrong appears content to knock out songs that could well have been salvaged from a skip at the back of Jack White’s home studio. “We thought, ‘Let’s make a mess and see where it goes,” he told Kerrang! last year. Save for the superior Junkies On A High, ‘it’ has gone nowhere. But the real problem with the Green Day’s 13th album is that it’s naff. Effortful, contrived, and archly self-conscious, it contains lyrics about teenage life from musicians who are pushing 50. On the front sleeve the word "motherf_____s" is of course obscured. But if the band intend to use this term, they should own it - blacklist from Walmart be damned. Most problematic of all is the curious decision to sample Joan Jett’s 1981 cover version of the Gary Glitter song Do You Wanna Touch Me. As has been proven in a court of law, the answer to this question is no.

Father of All... the new album by Green Day