Green Day
Leeds, England
June 7, 1994 at The Duchess of York
Details
- Venue
- The Duchess of York
- Location
- Leeds, England
- Date
- June 7, 1994
- Other Acts
- China Drum, Joeyfat
- Last Updated
Notes
- Recordings from this show can be found here
- Bob Blench: "Yes! I saw them play in Leeds last week and it was the best gig I've ever been to, so I kissed Billie Joe."
- Lauren Bell: "...never knew my dad did the sound for Green Day, my favourite band, and my mum was probably there, 6 month pregnant with me, insane!"
- James Winston Wright: "I remember being slightly boozed and trying to sell Billie Joe Armstrong my spare ticket for his own show outside the venue. Didn't know who he was back then, it was '94 I think."
- Steven Nicholls: "I came after work to see that gig, I had to sweet charm Becky on the door to let me in as it was full. They'd already shut the doors to get rid of people hanging around, luckily they'd opened them again to let some air in when I arrived..."
- Lis Tigi Maguire Coyle: "I worked that show too. People broke the windows to get in as they only played London and Leeds. Your dad will have assisted the touring crew with Green Day, and they had their own engineer. It quite possibly was my pal Randy Steffes, though I don't recall. He certainly worked for them back then."
- chungking48: "One of the best shows I've ever been to. The band were on the verge of blowing up and everyone, including them, knew it. They played pretty much every song they had, took requests, and at one point the entire crowd sat on the floor so that Billie Joe could stage dive."
- Ian Lawton: "Green Day suddenly weren't much fun when they became famous, after being a grassroots punk band (actually I say that, Tre Cool was fine) I had to bribe them with a bag of weed to sit down for a line up shot out the back of Leeds Duchess of York. Dookie had just become massive and possibly their egos with it."
- Paul Moody, NME: "The first great thing that happens is this. Singer Billie Joe, a man with peroxide in his hair and the central nervous system of a robot. comes on stage and just stares goggle-eyed at us. He makes no attempt to launch himself into first song '2,000 Light Years Away' until he's made himself acquainted with every familiar face in the place. By then large sections of the crowd are peeling themselves off the walls and launching themselves at a one foot square area directly in front of him. The song goes on for an hour and three-quarters. Billie Joe crunches out a ramalama three-chord thing, like an electric drill with strings, then suddenly the other two (whippet faced bassist Mike and drummer, erm, Tre Cool) bash away frantically after it, bring it to its knees and then set off wildly after another one almost exactly the same. There are two reasons why this never becomes remotely boring. The first is, each one is stripped to the bone. Whilst home-made three-pieces flounder around clumsy drummers and stretched out tangles of lead breaks, Green Day never let their songs run away from them. Instead they become huge, super-tight things, always threatening to spin off at tangents but always crashing back into an unbreakable steel-girdered chorus. ‘Welcome to Paradise’ and current single 'Longview' are probably the best (sort of a spunked-up Wildhearts on buzz-pills), but each one is a streamlined beauty, tumbling over and over itself with dashes of harmonies thrown in at every second verse. The second thing is Billie Joe himself. Unable to keep his mind on the songs (the band, though only in their mid-20s, have been together for ten years and three albums) he entertains himself by shooting huge fountains of phlegm into the air (which he then catches in the back of his throat) and exhorting the mostly airborne-crowd to further levels of delirium. He suggests we ‘bark like dogs’ and, almost to a (wo)man, we do. He demands that we sit down and suddenly the whole Duchess Of York is squeezed onto the sawdusted floor and dragging everybody else present down with them. It's all quite extraordinary. Here is a band cooler and dirtier than anything the Noo Wave has come up with, that take a washed out formula and make it sparkle. They've got songs to suck off The Lemonheads and enough skate-punk attitood to thrash out renditions of Survivor's 'Eye Of The Tiger' and Joni Mitchell's ‘Big Yellow Taxi' as encores and still never veer off into a kitsch disaster area. And judging by tonight's crowd euphoria (and the sold-out signs in London the previous night), the leap to stardom isn't even an issue. Green Day have already got there. It's just that we don't know about it yet."
Setlist
1. 2,000 Light Years Away
2. Disappearing Boy
3. Chump
4. Longview
5. Burnout
6. Welcome To Paradise
7. When I Come Around
8. Only Of You
9. Going To Pasalacqua
10. F.O.D.
11. Christie Road
12. Basket Case
13. Don't Leave Me
14. Knowledge (Operation Ivy cover)
15. Dominated Love Slave
16. All By Myself
17. 16
18. Paper Lanterns
19. My Generation (The Who cover)
20. Eye of the Tiger (Survivor cover)
21. Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell cover)
22. 80
23. At The Library
24. One Of My Lies
25. She
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