Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 21/11/05
Label: Warner Brothers

In the end, it comes down to two sets of lyrics. At the very start of the opening song of this live album, recorded during Green Day's two-night stint at the Milton Keynes Bowl in front of 130,000 people, Billie-Joe Armstrong sings "Can you hear the sound of hysteria?" And the answer, proved time and time again over the following sixty minutes, is an eardrum-rupturing yes.

Even before the band come on, the mostly teenage sounding crowd are screaming themselves into a seizure. Thanks to the magic of live mixing, Green Day appear to be playing smack bang in the middle of their fans, Lightning Bolt-style, the screams and shouts are almost as loud as the guitars themselves, but even so there's no tweaking that hysteria. The shrieks of excitement are amazing, and quickly infectious, while the singalongs (to practically every track) make being in the middle of a mob of Green Day fanatics sound like a whole heap of fun.

It helps to have a group blazing with confidence at the peak of their game, of course. Listening to Green Day storming through all nine minutes and five genre-shifts of "Jesus Of Suburbia" is still surprising - even twelve months after the release of the album "American Idiot" - simply because it's hard to fathom how the trio have managed to squeeze so much ambition out of a seemingly straightforward form as punk rock. The answer, of course, is that, like The Clash before them, they've stretched punk, to include surf pop, blue collar stadium rock, Bowie-style melodrama and "Grease"-like pop breeziness - and rage through them all like they're breaking into punk history.

Billie-Joe is also the consummate rock frontman. It takes every crowd-pleasing trick in the book to control a crowd of 60,000 plus, and he uses them all, several times. So we get shout-outs to "England!", which is now "the official home of Green Day" (which will no doubt come to a surprise to the other official homes of Green Day that the band visited on their European tour). We get the entire crowd chanting "One two, one two three four". We get more singalongs. We get everyone bawling the whistling hook to Monty Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life". We get bursts of pyro audibly exploding at the climax of every song. We get a ton of old-fashioned showbiz entertainment, essentially.

Are there any surprises? Well, apart from realising that the intro to "Brainstew" is an affectionate lift of Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4", and that the eclectism of "American Idiot" actually works retrospectively, recasting the older songs like "Holiday" into a contemporary context, no there aren't. But then contrary to the other pertinent Green Day lyric, just because it's predictable, it doesn't mean it's not right. And, yes, judging by the screaming on this album, everyone had the time of their lives.

    by Ian Watson