Manchester, England

Manchester was so incredible mainly because everyone was finally there. That was the huge selling point for me I guess, that it was the end of travelling on my own. Novarock was the last show I did alone and I was on a high coming into England. I remember changing over the rest of my money to pounds in Zurich, Switzerland, where I made my connecting flight. I only got 16 pounds out of it, and the guy doing the conversion didn’t think it was worth making the transaction due to all the comission, but I was grinning like a fool when he handed the money over. I was so excited.

Sitting in the departure lounge I was listening to all the accents of people travelling home, and my head was spinning from all the English being spoken around me. It was as though it was the first time I could ever actually hear, and it was then that I noticed just how much I shut out from world around me when I was in non-English speaking countries. I guess when you don’t understand you shut things out. And it’s simple things like languages that make you see that.

By the time I stepped on the plane I seriously thought I was going to explode. I remember listening to Bullet in a Bible, and almost laughing out loud at “alright England, are you ready!?” Getting to the line for the campout was my number one priority. I was already a bit nervous having only left Austria the day before the show. I caught the train out from the airport straight to Old Trafford and pretty much ran from the station to my hotel to check in, threw my things into the hotel room, tore my sleeping bag out of my bag (rather unceremoniously scattering my recently washed clothes across the room) and fumbling with the keys to lock the door the way you do when you’re really excited to get somewhere, and I flew down the stairs and up the street. From memory I think I stopped running when I saw the line just to appear a little calmer than I actually was. The closer I got the more obvious it became that the group was almost entirely my group of Aussies and it was all I could do to prevent the grin from entirely taking over my face.

I was welcomed so warmly that it was quite touching. Everyone sprung up to hug me hello and nice to meet you, in an overwhelming onslaught of introductions. Of these, I remember meeting Maha Raslan more clearly than anyone else in those first few seconds. She was the last to approach me, and having never even seen a photo of her before, I had absolutely no clue who she was. It sent my head spinning, cataloguing who I had already met, checking off names in a process of elimination to figure out who this raspy-voiced ball of excitement was. By the time it finally clicked in my head we were already hugging, and I gave her a delayed extra squeeze of recognition right before she let me go. When she looked back up at me after I released her, I’m sure my face was set in a stunned and vacant look, with a staggered grin half hanging onto my face. Never had such a large group of people all been so collectively excited to see me.

 As soon as I plopped down on the concrete in amongst all these people, whose names I was matching up with facebook profile pictures and trying to nail down distinctive personalities for in my head, it felt as if that’s exactly where I was always supposed to be sitting, and that these people were the people I always had hung out with.

Even though I was trying really hard to keep talking and contribute to the conversations, I felt really nervous and really overcome with how much I genuinely liked all these people sitting around me, and how they seemed to like me too. My initiation was complete when Kerry, the blue haired, totally in control I’m-not-going-to-take-any-bullshit doctor who introduced herself as “Mum”, tied a Green Day bracelet around my wrist. This was a gesture that nearly brought me to tears, as I glanced around seeing them on the wrists of everybody close by, it really made me see that these guys really considered me one of them. I was actually on the inside here – I was a part of this.

My clearest memory from the line up that afternoon was how excited everyone was about the Soundcheck that they’d luckily caught earlier on. Elle, who I actually remembered from Melbourne, was buzzing and relayed to me the level of new fear her not-Green-Day-liking boyfriend now had of her after bearing witness to her unexpected eager display at the tram station where she’d scaled the wall to get a better look after hearing Mike’s bass.

The girls were all absolutely thrilled with the view they had in their recently acquired hotel, and showed me a video from soundcheck, watching my face with expectant grins, and squeaking with delight at watching the fresh memory unfold again on the camera screen. The video was from the balcony of their room, and began with a view of Billie Joe, which very quickly turned to a blur of concrete and legs as Belinda stated with disbelief “Guys, I think he can see us!”, which was shortly followed by a cacophony of screaming as apparently Billie proved that, yes, yes he could.

The line that afternoon was such an electric atmosphere to be a part of- everyone was on such a high from what they had seen or heard and positively shaking from excitement and anticipation for the show the next day. The hours passed the way they do in line ups, only this time it was just a fraction more electric than previous ones.

The photographs I took from the show in Manchester, when viewed in consecutive order, go a long way in proving just how much I was craning my head around the corner to catch a glimpse of Jeff. However, my actually memories of the show are filled with the vicious pit, Billie Joe and the beginning of an irrational paranoia.

I shared the barrier with Jax May and Susi Stoiber, without who I never would have been in the front row at all. Despite all that time spent queuing up, you can’t help what happens when your ticket just won’t scan on the way in.After she helped me squeeze in, we talked about how she had a feeling about this show being special, which proved to be true later on when Billie Joe took a fancy to her fluffy pink cowboy hat and decided to take it off her. The wait on the barrier that day was exciting ona level i’d never experienced before.  I could see so many familiar faces around me. We were just one huge group of friends, bubbling with anticipation, waiting for the biggest thing in our lives to walk out on the stage.

The pit was rough. Rougher than anything I’ve ever experienced. Never, in my entire life have I been as disturbed by an injury as I was when a girl had her leg deliberately broken in 7 different places by some men who thought they were better, but who actually were much bigger, than everyone else.

Jarod was the first to be pulled out, with a grim expression that said that clearly screamed out that this band he didn’t even like weren’t worth getting nailed in the back of the head for three hours for. Almost immediately afterwards and to my absolute horror, I saw Belinda get dragged over the barrier and carried out, an absolute wreck and utterly defeated by the violence of the men around her. Next to go was Elle, and that was harder for me to watch, because she was so close to me when she finally had to go. Watching her face through Geek Stink Breath, one of her favourite songs, was heartbreaking. She was clinging to the barrier in a way that prevented her body from moving at all. She remained set in steely denial that she was going to be able to make it, in a strange mixture of determination and pain which eventually crumbled to a bitterly accepting nod of the head to the security and an anguished “Can you get me out?” I don’t remember if she made it through the song or not. It was awful.

Later on in the show, Billie Joe started a speech that planted a poisonous and irrational seed of paranoia in my brain. I don’t know what started it, it what it was about, but I just know that it made me feel sick. I don’t remember his actual words, but I remember that he was talking about bands splitting up. It seems stupid to admit it now, but at the time this speech sent me into an almost blinding panic-trip. The way he started to talk immediately made me wary about what he was going to say. He was talking about bands splitting up I couldn’t believe that I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. I was standing there thinking that I was hearing the announcement of the end of Green Day until he finished off the entire rant with something about having to wheel him out in a coffin to get him out of the band.

In hindsight I realise something that apparently everybody else in the L.C.C.G seemed to already know. That Billie was just talking about how much he loved being in this band. Sometimes, he just has an over-emotional way of getting to the point. There was something about what he said that night that opened my eyes to the possibility that Green Day might not always be around, even though  that’s opposite to the point Billie Joe was starting to make, and that thought plagued almost constantly until Prague.

However, if you exclude the pit and the weird Billie speech from the equation entirely, and watching my friends get pulled out, Manchester was my favourite show up until that point. Which is strange considering that afterwards, a lot of the others definitely did not agree.

What mainly excited me about the show itself was that Billie Joe recognised me, without a doubt, for the first time. He ran past me during King for a Day, along the catwalk where I was standing, and he did what can only be described as a double take and he glanced back at me with a huge grin. There are no words to describe what it felt like to have Billie Joe Armstrong react to me that way, but I guess it can be compared to the way it would feel to win the lottery. What had I done to be worth a look like that from someone who had until recently been no more than a legend? Being recognised by Billie really made me feel like the luckiest person in the world, especially being surrounded by friends when it happened.

The attention from Billie continued after that right through to the end of the set. He spent a large amount of time during Wake Me Up When September Ends glancing over his shoulder towards Aska, Jax and I, with such a sneaky and sly expression in his eyes, like he was proud that he was able to look at us without anthe arena full of tens of thousands of people noticing. It was our little joke to share together, except what he seemed to find a little bit amusing, we all seemed to find mindblowingly attractive. His face kept splitting into a little grin at our reactions that he kept trying to hide. He knew that we knew he was looking at us, and it seemed to boost his ego a little at how we were all transfixed by him. The way his hair was all sweaty, and hanging down in clumps over his eyes, the contrast between the beauty of the song he was playing and the mischief on his face built us right up until finally he finished all three of us off with a wayward wink and we all collapsed into one and other just from the sheer sex in his eyes.

That having occurred right during the final encore, I was still reeling from it when the crowd broke at the end of the show. I remember checking with Jax and Aska if I’d imagined it and feeling like i’d just taken a shot when they confirmed that I hadn’t. Maybe that’s what made Manchester seem like my favourite gig so far. Although I’m sure deep down I’m not that shallow.

That night as I tried to get to sleep, I was replaying the Billie-wink over and over in my head, only slightly aware of the nagging paranoia that was about to sink its teeth into the back of my brain. What the hell caused that rant about bands splitting up?

Nicklesdorf, Austria

I made it into Austria pretty much flawlessly. I made it out to the festival without a hitch, but it was as if they’d decided to hold it in the desert, there was nothing but dust everywhere, and the heat was so dry that it was automatically uncomfortable. By the time I made it into the pit I was covered head to toe in red dirt. I’d left the others in Munich, and would be meeting up with them again in Manchester, where the rest of the group was beginning the tour. This would be my last one alone until Italy, at the very end of the European leg.

It was early in the day and there weren’t many people in the pit so I made my way to the position I wanted to be in to wait it out until a spot opened up, which didn’t take very long at all. The festival staff had giant fans running on the pit that sprayed water on us between the sets, and they were trying their best to keep drinks up to us, but it just didn’t seem like enough. People were getting pulled out all day, constantly. 

When the Hives hit the stage is when I started to get excited, it was like the home stretch until Green Day came on. This was the second time i’d seen them support Green Day, and I was horrified to see their lead singer copy a lot of Billie’s on stage antics. Things he hadn’t done the first time i’d seen them. From “hey oh’”s to Billie’s “new one” He was bringing them all out. It was amusing, but at the same time I was a little scandalised by his blatant and unreserved copying– not something I worry about now, knowing that Billie Joe is quite prone to a bit of that himself.. But that’s another story, to be told at another time.

By the time Joan Jett hit the stage I was really starting to get excited. It’s a testament to how hot the weather was, because she’d ditched her usual leather bodysuit for a bikini top with black jeans. As always, I was getting into Joan’s set, but as much as I loved watching her, I was excited when it started to get towards the end. Being up the front of the pit, and so close to the stage I was blocked off from what the weather was doing at this point, and didn’t notice just how windy it’d suddenly got. But things started blowing around on the stage, and the sound was getting interrupted a few times, and there was all sorts of things being blown up into the air. But even when Joan said “Sorry guys they’re kicking us off” the alarm didn’t go up in my head that Green Day wouldn’t be playing.

It was only when the crowd started to move that I figured something was actually wrong, and because I didn’t understand the directions of security, who were walking across the pit with “do not cross” tape to clear it out and section it off. I had no idea what was going on and I watched security slam one man who’d refused to move off the barrier head first into the ground, and I heard his jaw crack loudly against the aluminium base of the barricade, but he continued to try and fight them off. It was hectic and confusing, and I’ve never felt more lost. Thankfully the guy who was handing out the water, and who i’d been chatting to earlier (and therefore knew I only spoke English) headed my way to explain that because of the dust storm the show had to be postponed until the weather cleared up, and that it was unsafe for the crowd to remain in the area.

When the people were gone from behind me I got hit in the face full force by the wind, and I had to take my bandanna off and tie it around my face Gloria style to prevent myself from inhaling the dust. I did agree that it would have been impossible to perform in weather like this, but that didn’t stop me from feeling entirely crushed. Those who have experienced that horrible feeling when Green Day postpone don’t need me describe how quickly a feeling of utter disdain invades your entire nervous system. But for those who have been lucky enough to avoid it, you can taste the bile rising up in your throat and your eyes burn with the tears that you’ll only let fall at the sound of the executioner mega-phoning the dreaded word “cancelled”. There’s nothing you can do but sit and wait, half-heartedly hoping for the best, but already resigned to the worst, and preparing for the misery that will accompany the confirmation. Every time you sight an employee your heart beat races and the adrenaline hits you as if you’d just missed the first step of a flight of stairs. It’s a tetchy waiting period, full of fluctuating emotions that leaves you entirely drained of energy.

This, a lot of us experienced in December 2009, when Billie Joe was struck down with food poisoning and the second Melbourne concert had to be rescheduled for the next day. The stress of that day began to ring in my ears, and I began to panic. At least in Melbourne I spoke the same language as the staff, and the people with access to mobile internet. In Melbourne, it was comparatively easy to get information, but in Austria, I didn’t have the slightest hope of understanding what was going on, and I was left to sit alone in the dirt and base my judgement of what was going on by the way people were standing and the tone of their voices.

They made us wait in the food area of the festival ground and I knew that I had to linger as close to the front as I possibly could, because I wouldn’t understand the announcement, if it came, that said we were allowed back into the pit, so I had to be ready to run at the first sight of movement. There was easily 200 metres between where the crowd was grouped and the entrance to the pit, which would bottleneck at some barricades to the right. The ground was rough, mostly loose and bare dirt littered with dangerous patches of gravel and large stones and the occasional tuft of grass. It was not at all a safe sprinting surface for even someone half as uncoordinated as I. My outlook was that at best, there would be a stampede, and at worst, a riot. In my head I was mapping out my route to the barricade, and watching every movement made by everyone around me and listening for any change of atmosphere in the voices around me and was particularly focused on the movements and body language of the security, who were littered across the festival grounds ready to pounce on anyone disobeying instructions.

Despite the mental preparation, my game plan didn’t work, and when we did get let back in, I was trampled in the onslaught. Being unable to see where I was running, I slipped on nearly every patch of gravel that i’d been determined to miss and by the time I made it to the small gates, I could see over the rail that the barrier was already full. When I finally I made it into the pit, I was nowhere near where I’d been standing for more than twelve hours that day. It was one of my more heartbreaking tour moments.

But Green Day eventually came on stage, and that’s what mattered most. And they absolutely blew me away, just like they always do. By the time Know Your Enemy was on, I learnt that the more stressful the day you have, the more likely you are to appreciate every little moment of the show. Everyone in the pit was treating this gig like a party they didn’t expect to occur, it was like the atmosphere of the grand finale of a sporting event, and Green Day roused a very hectic and enthusiastic reaction, as if our team had both won and lost at the same time. I had a lot of frustration to vent at that show, and it was one of my top 5 most emotionally draining gigs. But what I’ll always remember most about Novarock is the dust.

I remember feeling as though I was standing in a sea of red, and everywhere I looked we all seemed to be doused in copper, as if someone had turned the contrast right up on a digital photo. The storm may have died down, but the evidence of it was all over our faces and all over our clothes. The lighting from the stage danced through us, accentuating the colour of the dust with the blue-green sections of the show, and dramatically exaggerating it to almost alarming measures during the red-toned lighting sections of the performance.

I remember Jaded being particularly intense. The fast pace of the song, as it always does, increased the energy levels in the pit and set off a chain reaction of movement. Being at the back and to the side I was able to see the fluctuations as people jumped around, threw themselves at each other and surged forward and backward in unpredictable and violent intervals. We were entirely doused in blue light, which when combined with the overwhelming tones of red, sent exaggerated shadows flying across the faces of the constantly moving crowd, making them look less and less human with every jump. The extreme heat still rising from the ground which had retained it through the storm, combined with the smell of the dust rising due to thousands of stamping feet, the taste of dirt and blood burning my throat as I screamed along with the chaotic shouts of the festival-goers blending into the heated tone of Billie Joe’s voice gnashing in our ears made everything seem less real and more like a chaotic and trippy cartoon. The air rushed out of my lungs with every surge of movement, and I ignored the screaming protest of my body as I hurled it around and the throbbing of my pulse in my ears. Jaded removed all traces of civilisation from the crowd and we transformed into demons rioting in the fires of hell which had been unleashed upon this dustbowl in Nickelsdorf, Austria. It was toxic, a maniacal invasion set to the pounding of Tre’s drumkit.

By the time the show ended I was more than exhausted, and I left the pit area dragging my feet through the dust in an almost zombie-like fashion. The storm meant that I couldn’t play out my original plan of sleeping on the campground, as without a tent, I faced sleeping in the dust and becoming eternally coated in it. I opted to take the bus back into the city to try my luck for a hotel. The bus ride took well over an hour and when it finally arrived, I walked around the city looking for a hotel and when I found one, I went in to book a room for the night.

They guy at the counter wouldn’t let me check in so late, but he let me use one of the share bathrooms on the next floor to have a shower, which, after 8 shows of no opportunity, I was in dire need of. The same night clerk then allowed me to sleep a little bit in the hotel breakfast room, and he moved all the chairs in the room to block me from view, but kept coming in to stare and make weird and suggestive facial gestures at me, before returning to the counter and repeating the cycle.  I didn’t feel comfortable staying there, it felt well and truly like the right time to bail, and to do so I had to throw my bag over the chair-fort and crawl along the booth to get around it, then stealthily wait until he had gone into the back room to photocopy something. Taking my opportunity, I said a very rushed thankyou and quickly bustled out the door and made my way down the street and checked in to a hotel just up the road.

I sat down the next day and thought about what I had written to Billie, Mike and Tre six months ago.  I thought about the way I had felt seeing Billie Joe for the first time up close through a car window. The way I had cried when I clutched a pick Mike had handed to me in my fist. The way Tre driving past and taking the time to wave out the window had made me feel as though I’d just seen something as equally non-existent as a unicorn. I thought back to the days of driving out of town at 2 in the morning and screaming, blind angry tears spilling out of my eyes, to Jesus of Suburbia just to feel like I could get away. I remembered the nights I’d spent sleeping in the car on a back road somewhere after the fights with my boyfriend at the time, and being too proud to go home. I thought about the girl who fell asleep leaning against the wall in the shower, after a 16 hour day of work. I remembered back to a time when it felt like my life depended on the outcome of an exam result – that now I can’t even recall. Most of all, I remembered the girl who had sat on the floor in her room at the age of 13, oblivious to the outside world, staring up at three men who at that point were nothing more than a pipe dream and a pretty picture.

It was that day that I realised that the girl who had written that letter, on a torn out piece of paper from a school workbook, complete with modern History notes scribbled on the back, was not the same girl who was sitting in Austria right now. That was really and truly the very last day of the Old Liz. So I took out my journal and I wrote a new letter to Green Day.

Munich, Germany

On my way out of Helsinki, I guess it’s safe to say that I learnt the second important lesson that this tour would teach me. I remember waking up the day after the show and thinking to myself, “wow I had the greatest dream last night. Oh wait, that wasn’t a dream”. That statement alone sums up what changed in me overnight. Luckily I had the extra time in Finland to let it sink in a little bit. I ended up using it sitting on the docks, thinking about Longview and staring off into the distance in the direction of, I think, Russia. My mind was in an absolute shambles. Pieces of thought had intercepted and cut each other off, leaving my head reeling with hundreds of thousands of disjointed thought processes.

 Being on tour, there’s an overwhelming amount of amazing things going on. They all happen so quickly and consecutively, one after the other, “OMFG” after “OMFG”, in a never ending onslaught of incredible. Being close enough to the stage each time to have eye contact was the beginning of it, but that’s not something that I ever saw. What I saw as the beginning was being on stage with Green Day. The very thing I had wanted the most had actually happened, and that marked the obvious beginning of everything that snowballed from that moment on. Those moments on the dock in Finland were probably the last I had for the entire European tour to actually take a step back and let it sink in.

Sitting in the waiting room at the airport, waiting for my plane to Munich, the perfect symbol of this new and exciting step literally walked right in. Fittingly, I was sitting with my little laptop watching a youtube video that had just been uploaded of me on stage, grinning like an idiot, and I happened to glance up and see no one other than Joan Jett taking a seat just across from me.

My introduction to Joan had been in Denmark, and I remember thinking after perhaps, two moments of her being on stage, that she was nothing like anyone I’d ever seen in my life, and that I liked that. At the end of the bargain, I really liked what they played.

I started at her for a moment and then in a little flurry of movement I shut my computer and stuffed it into my bag, standing up quickly without really knowing what I was doing. I walked over to her, squinting at her in disbelief. It was undeniably her, but what the hell was she doing flying with me?

“You’re Joan Jett, right?” I’d said to her. She looked at me and said, in a no nonsense voice. “Well, yes I am.” That confirmation was enough. For some reason I let go of a lot of anxiety in that moment, and it came out in a big gush of air and I said “Wow. I just. I love you!” Joan laughed and so began our conversation.

What really stuck in my mind about meeting Joan was just how normal a situation we were in, but at the same time how obviously and unquestionably remarkable she was. Everything about her, from the way she talked to the way she sat down just screamed that she was somebody quite special. Looking at her face, it’s written in every little expression how much life she’s experienced, and it still held such obvious beauty it blew me away.

 Joan and her manager talked to me pretty much the entire time we waited for the plane, about a lot of things, including the possibility of her coming out to Australia early the next year. She took a photo with me, and signed a copy of her CD “To Liz, rock til you drop, love Joan”. It sounds like a throwaway line, but it wasn’t really. After explaining to her what I was doing – following the Green Day tour- Joan had given me a little glimpse of very well informed advice. She’d sat down next to me, and gave me a very quick little life lesson, which pretty much came down to just “you’re on the right track”, then took the CD out of my hands saying “Here, i’ll sign it for you”.

Munich was the show where the first of the Australian girls would be heading out to start catching the tour and this was initially the first show on my list of dates as well, that was, until Green day added more in some kind of geographically retarded succession. I’d been following the facebook updates, and in the back of my mind I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure which of the online girls I would be meeting tonight. We were planning to meet at the venue in the evening of the day before the show, as I was intending to spend most of the day with someone who was, at that point, a friend of mine. I’d bought for her a ticket to this show as a birthday gift months ago, which later that day she informed me that she no longer required as since then she’d bought her own.

Just as it was getting dark I got on the train with my newly spare ticket and followed my pre-prepared directions to the venue. By the time I made it to the station that Google maps informed me was mine, it was well and truly dark. This was weird to me, as it was only 10pm!! I’d just spent nearly two weeks in Scandinavia, where that kind of lighting is just not normal. I walked for probably 45 minutes before I even caught sight of the venue, and when I did, I could not figure out where I was supposed to go to queue up. What if they weren’t even here? Taking what my map said was the right road, but what looked like an Ivan Milat infested walkway, eerily obscured from view by trees and lack of lighting, I’d appeared to have made it to where I was supposed to be. It only half seemed right. There were trucks -Green Day trucks - and I could actually see the stage, but at the same time, there were horse floats, and occasionally, set up in a gypsy like fashion, obviously horse-y people sitting around their trailers. I was so confused.

Funnily enough, the environment I was in wasn’t even slightly intimidating to me by this point in the tour. I’d seen weirder things and been weirder places. It wasn’t really phasing me, I was just worried that I had the wrong place.

One thing you need to know about me for the next few paragraphs to make any sense is that I’m extremely, but internally, socially awkward. Especially at that point in time. Since then I’ve changed a fair bit and grown a lot more and lost a fair bit of the self-consciousness that plagued me through most of my teenage years. However right then, I was thinking about the 3 girls I would be meeting in hopefully just a few minutes, and I was positively, right to the core, terrified. Thankfully, one of my stronger skills was pretending to be confident. I’m one of those people who are really talkative and bouncy when you first meet me. That’s mostly cause I’m shitting myself, and petrified of you, and trying as hard as I possibly can not to let you know it. Sometimes I don’t even bother trying and it’s painfully obvious how uncomfortable I am.

As I walked down this creepy alleyway, I was going through in my head all the possible horrible outcomes of tonight. I would be seeing so much of these people in the coming months, and if we didn’t get along, and I didn’t fit in, the tour would become fairly awkward, and it would lose so much of its fun. I wasn’t scared of doing the rest on my own, that wasn’t a problem at all. I’d become so used to being alone, and not just on this trip. I was just worried about tension and unnecessary drama arising out of personality clashes ruining the experience for us all. Mostly though, just on a basic human level, I really wanted these girls to like me, as much as I could deal with being on my own, I really didn’t want to. Something about that feeling after getting off stage in Helsinki had stuck around. I wanted, so badly, to share this entire experience with someone.

The first thing I noticed was the accent. I heard them before I ever got a glimpse, and oh my god, just Australian just doesn’t even begin to cover it. I remember feeling overwhelming relief, a jolt of excitement and a huge spike of anxiety at the same time. I’d found them and there was no doubt about that, and now came the tricky part. Here we go.

I can’t remember who shouted out first. If I said hello, or if they nervously inquired of the bushes “Is that you Liz?”. Evidently I had taken the longest and, apparently, forbidden route to the venue. I’d come from the back and through the inside. This proved for a really great icebreaker as one of them said “Oooh you came from the scary side!”. That’s when my mask went on - my stupid “I’m so bubbly and excited” mask – the one that covers up the terror and the awkwardness while the rest of me shrinks inward as far out of sight as possible.

Luckily, I had so much to talk about, and I was almost bursting at the seams to let it out. I didn’t need that mask for very long. After only 5 minutes I was almost entirely at ease. I guess I really did have a lot to say. I’d just been on stage – god knows I had a thousand things to say about that. Just that morning I’d met Joan Jett, which was something else that made it really easy to start up a conversation. And on their side of the court, this was their first show, and I’d been at this for long enough already to be in the swing of things. They were sitting at the start of their adventure and I came barrelling out of the bushes with eye witness recounts of Tre singing “I want you to Know”, of being on stage, the distance between the barrier and the stage, it’s height, Billie’s ignorance to the impending influx of Australians at his line “Fucking Aussies”, what the support bands were like, how the crowds had been, the different levels of culture shock - everything. Talking to them in real life was just as easy as it had been online, only much more fun.

It was like this wasn’t the first time we’d met. Which in a roundabout way is kind of true. After about 3 seconds of Lorie speaking, I realised I knew who she was. She’d been sitting very close to me in the line for the Melbourne Green Day shows. I very clearly remembered her proudly telling everyone that she’d finally found a way to make her name fit with a Green Day song. “Hey Lorie-a…get it? Loria…as in Gloria” She had such a natural air of “nice” that it was literally impossible to feel out of place being near her. She was so automatically friendly, and so ridiculously excited and loud that it made the whole environment feel like we’d just always known each other.

Belinda sat the furthest from me, and when she spoke, it was from the shadows. She was mysterious from the word go. She was quieter than the others, but at the same time had this contagious sense of fun about her, despite her obvious exhaustion. She spoke with an indistinguishable balance of seriousness and enthusiasm that gave her an automatic quality of being quite generally cool. My first impression of her is a little hazier than the others, but I do remember, very clearly, thinking that I suspected she could be a remarkably strong person.

Leisha struck me right from the very first moment as being remorselessly and entirely herself. She was wearing what looked like suede track pants with a shiny gold stripe down the side. She was obviously very fit, and sported a short bob cut. She was studying linguistics at university and was a dance instructor in her spare time. Her eclectic collection of interests made a huge impression on me that night and I remember sitting there thinking that I had never met anyone even remotely like her before. She certainly didn’t fall into any stereotypical category that sprung to mind immediately, and she seemed to be defiant of the usual hallmark characteristics of Green Day fans.

In fact, that’s what I think it was about all these girls that really hit home on that first impression. None of them were stereotypical, in even the slightest way. They all had such unique personalities screaming from every inch of them, even when they weren’t speaking, that they were so intensely interesting. There was nothing about them at all that could have ranked them as the same as anyone else I’d met before, or as ever being “just another face”. They all had such an obvious depth of character that nobody could ever look at them and have “the girl who liked Green Day a lot” be enough to ever describe any of them.

Belinda, Leisha and Lorie all showed me that night what it looked like to be yourself, and love your passions with everything you’ve got without being defined by them.

Passing the time was effortless. I don’t even remember everything that we talked about, but it was as easy as blinking. We all had a lot of questions for each other, and we were all wound up with one kind of excitement or another. We shared hotel stories, ranging from the farm animals I’d shared the premisis with in Denmark to the aptly dubbed “awkward shower” in the hotel room they currently were staying in. We embarked on adventures to the faraway land of port-a-loo’s and I was treated to a tim-tam brought fresh from the homeland. It was a really fun night.

Even so, it didn’t take me long to get into my sleeping bag, stash my shoes as far away from my nose as I could without losing them and settle down for the long haul line up. At some point in the evening Susi Stoiber came back to the line. I’d been told a lot about her by the girls but i’d never actually met her. However she was so incessantly lovely that I couldn’t help but be entirely addicted to her friendliness right from the very first moment. She was such a stark contrast to the German “friend” I’d spent the morning with that I just couldn’t get enough of her. She had absolutely none of the bitterness and subtle undertones of cynicism and sarcastic side comments I’d spent the morning listening to, and pretending not to notice, and it sky rocketed my fondness of Germany to all new levels.

The next day in the line brought on a whole new round of first impressions, and I met Melanie Dwane, who spent the entire day with us, putting up with my fascination with her Irish accent and strange compliments about her name being my favourite. That day I also met Denise and Sven from Germany for the very first time. There aren’t even words to descried Denise. She’s so bubbly and wonderful, and she cursed the behaviour of my German friend on my behalf when I told her the story (yes there was a story at that point. The blowing off of the ticket was only the latest in a series of “oh for fucks sake” worthy events which had been taking place since December) and walked me around the line in the afternoon trying to help me get rid of it by advertising the ticket in the native tongue.

At about 3 o clock in the afternoon my friend showed up, and seeing me at the front of the line, she cut in front of everyone who’d been there all day and having only said “hi” and then ignoring everyone around her, she plopped herself down with us. At the very front of the line with only an hour until gates, fanning herself with her ticket and looking around as if waiting for someone to ask her what she wanted to drink. Luckily, and unexpectedly, Leisha, Belinda, Lorie and I all had early entry, as Susi and Denise had spent their time trying to find us people with spare plus ones – a gesture I’ll never forget, and never stop being grateful for. So just as my German friend cut in the line, we left it for Early Entry, which thankfully balanced it out, so no one behind us got too out of sorts, as far as I could tell.

The wait for the gates to open, once in the early entry line, was far more exciting than any of the previous shows had been. It was a entirely a different experience, lining up with people you know and being let in together. The closest I’d gotten to this, at that point, had been to be chatting to people in the line, sharing the experience. But once those gates open, you’re on your own again, and everyone splits up to go to their favourite spot, often never to be seen or heard from again. So this was different for me. This was special.

By the time we hit the barrier, emotions were running high. It seemed like a huge accomplishment, for us to be lined up there exactly where we wanted to be, all of us next to one and other. Comrades for the evening, not separated by the sea of anonymous faces that threaten to fill in the slightest gap. We were together, and for me, it felt a little bit like that’s the way Green Day shows are supposed to be. Fans turned into friends because of a shared love of these songs, a wordless alliance that means you can be exactly who you are and not have to hide it behind a mask.

Leisha Kapor, Belinda Vella and Lorie Way met me the day after the very best day of my life, and I guess that helped me out a lot in being initially likeable. For a convenient coincidence, that day I had been excessively excited and happy. I was genuinely talkative and genuinely full of actual interesting things to say. By the time we were lined up there on that barrier, it hadn’t subconsciously sunk in yet that these weren’t just people i’d be spending the show with that night, but many more to come.  As we stood together, lined up on that barrier waiting for the show, I tried to wrap my head around this being the very first time I’d ever gone to Green Day in a group that I was initially and planned to be a part of, not a group that I had bumped in to and tagged along with on the day.

Despite my being-on-stage found Billie Joe infatuation that had been at the overwhelming forefront of my brain that day, I still had space in my head to think of Jeff.  I flashed back to him in that corridor and I felt a little bit like the way he had looked. That I kind of fit here with these people. Maybe that’s why I didn’t really need my mask that day, or much more ever again from that point on.

Helsinki, Finland

“Alright we need the next contestant!” stated Billie Joe rather matter-of-factly into the microphone as he went strutting down his catwalk to find the suitable person. The yell that I let out of my lungs at that moment felt like it tore up through my chest as if I’d just coughed up a stone I’d accidently swallowed. Those words sent a thrill through my veins that propelled me into action faster than ever before. I waved my arms frantically, both mentally and verbally begging for Billie to look my way, bellowing at him to turn around. “Where are ya?” He asked, chuckling into the microphone, bending down to look at the faces in the crowd.

He turned around and looked my way. I started jumping, waving my arms so hard and fast that they began to ache and increased the volume of my yelling until I couldn’t breathe any more. Suddenly everyone was on my side. Everyone standing close by  who i’d been talking to at the start of the show suddenly started waving their arms and pointing at me. The girl and the group of boys to my right all started waving their arms and pointing to me too. People sandwiched into the corner on my left all turned and started pointing at me, with mildly concerned facial expressions. No-one in Finland could scream louder than I had that day, and nothing seemed more important or more proper than making sure Billie picked me.

“She knows it…she knows it. He knows it….SHE knows it.” Billie said, and he was looking me right in the eye, he had stopped pointing spastically throughout the crowd, and he had landed on me. He was pointing right at me, questioning the authenticity of my request. My heart stopped beating for a split second, and I started nodding frantically. “You swear? You swear to God?!” “Yes, yes, yes, yes!!!” I said hysterically, over and over again and I was already spasmodically trying to pull myself up over the barrier all the while my body had erupted into some kind of all over pins and needles. “Alright get your ass up here” he said and turned around and walked back up to the centre of the stage. Those words made me feel like I’d just gone down a few floors in an elevator too quickly.

Two hands pulled me out from the barrier by my armpits. It felt effortless, but my brain was already on stage. I practically flew over the barricade, and I started running as soon as I was on two feet. Without a glance back and with such an urgent sense of forward movement I rushed toward the stage. The jolt from coming into harsh impact with the ground killed the feeling in my legs and hurt the bones in my feet - I’d landed on concrete, and this was a really cold day. I scrambled onto a box near the catwalk and threw my arms up onto the stage, slamming my chest onto the edge of the stage and knocking all the remaining air out of my lungs. There was such a sense of urgency, of purpose. I was fumbling about trying to pull myself up on stage as quickly as was humanly possible. My blood was rushing in my ears and I was full of the same kind of adrenaline that propels a 5 year old out of bed on the morning of their birthday.

“Here she comes” Billie commentated.  I started to climb up. My hands sprawled out onto the stage in front of me, and gripping with my fingers I pulled myself up onto it as the muscles in my arms screamed in protest. The black of the stage and the silver glint of the metallic edging burned into my memory, the greying skyline and the clumped mass of colour of the crowd blurred across my vision. It all happens so slowly and so fast at the same time, but I’ll never forget just how real it all seemed in that moment. “This is actually happening” I said to myself with such a triumphant sense of pure joy that that phrase alone is what pulled me to my feet. There was no pause. I ran even before I was steady, my entire body numb with the way I had just abused it to get here. Thudding and unfeeling, I ran to Billie, counting in my mind every time I took a step forward.

On December 11, 2009, I had sat outside the loading dock of Acer Arena, in Sydney Australia, waiting for Green Day to drive past on their way back to their hotel. Clutched in my hand I had a letter I had written to the boys, and I was hoping that by some amazing shred of luck I would get a chance to give it to them. My breathing had been just recovering from mosh pit adrenaline, and my throat felt raw from recycled air and screaming my life along with them.

Sitting on the concrete next to me had been a girl named Danielle. Her eyes were wild with the overwhelming experience of that very first Green Day show, but she looked exhausted which helped her maintain a sense of calm. She’d watched the spectacle from the stands, but she was just as exhilarated as if she’d been right there on the barrier where she belonged. Addicted wonder danced across her face as she looked at the photos I had on my camera from up the front and she looked mindblown and disbelieving when I promised to send them to her. It had been my first time being that close and my head was spinning from eye contact, catching little facial expressions and generally just seeing my heroes up close in all their glory. Danielle right in that moment reminded me so strongly of the way I had been in 2005. When I had first seen Green Day, my eyes would have been just as wide as hers were then and there, full of the wonder and magic of that first experience.

Green Day’s vans pulled out of the venue and we watched Billie wave to us as he went blurring past. Raw and pure thrill went firing through my body. My letter was crumpled in my hand and I watched them drive up the road, my pulse racing and my heart beating loudly in my ears. At the end of the street the van pulled to a halt at a red light. As soon as this happened I hurled myself to my feet and threw myself down that road, running as fast as I could hoping to catch the van and maybe throw my letter through the window. The moment of indecision was long enough for me to hear Danielle shout out “good luck!” as I took off along the pavement and into the dark, counting my steps as the fence blurred past and the concrete flew up to meet me.

I crashed straight into Billie Joe’s arms and thudded back into the present. For a split second those few steps along the catwalk had been the pavement that night in Sydney, both times running to catch up with Billie Joe, only this time I’d made it. Here I was in Finland of all places, holding the very most important person in my entire life. There was nothing in the world that seemed more appropriate to do than hug him. I both laughed and cried at the same time. The imaginary cheers of Danielle and fourteen year old Liz rang through my mind and the words of my letter echoed through my memory in that moment. “Green Day to me is the sound that began my life as I know it - the big bang of my own personal existence.”  I tried to telepathically beam my thoughts at Billie Joe, who had immediately returned the hug I’d forced upon him. I tried to express the teenage years of my life, the gratitude for the reliable consistency, the emotion behind every single time I’d ever screamed along to Green Day and really meant it. I tried to pour it all into the way I hugged him, and I pulled him as close as was possible with some kind of ecstatic disbelief. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 I felt Billie’s arms across my back, squeezing air I didn’t think was left out of me. I gave up on breathing; it seemed so unnecessary, and just laughed, utterly filled with pure joy. I was so lost in this moment and everything that it meant to me to be standing here clinging to Billie Joe Armstrong. He shifted his hold on me and lifted me up into the air, totally going with the intensity of the way I was hugging him. Setting my feet back on solid ground, Billie and I stepped apart. He handed me the microphone and I took it. Suddenly breathing did seem important again. My lungs were screaming and I gasped in a huge gulp of air and swallowed it rather than breathed it in.

Billie Joe whispered at me “Peel me off. Okay? You okay? Peel me off this Velcro seat. You good?” I nodded without looking at him. I was staring at the crowd, and I had never seen so many people in my life, and they were all staring straight at me, and for the first, and probably only, time in my life, I didn’t feel self conscious or nervous. For the first time in my entire life, I didn’t care who was looking at me, and I didn’t for one second care what they thought and I wasn’t scared or intimidated by one single person out there in that crowd. I took one more shallow breath and opened my mouth and forced out, with almost zero supporting air, the words “Peel me off this Velcro seat”.

My voice wasn’t waiting for me in the place where it usually is and I struggled to actually find it. When I started to, for lack of a better word, sing, my voice came out in deep alien sound that I’d never heard before and it took me a while to adjust to it. Deciding that I couldn’t care less what I sounded like, I started off down the catwalk, choking out the words to “Longview” feeling happier than I ever had in my entire life. Right on the end of the runway, a couple of girls I had been chatting to in the line were looking up at me waving with the most excited and supportive facial expressions that they could muster. I grinned, and laughed with these girls and bent down to sing to them for a little bit. Then I turned around and ran up the stage and across to Mike. As I approached him I tried to take in absolutely every little detail possible. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t want to get in the way of his bass, so I quickly kissed him on the neck and ran off laughing to the very right of the stage. Due to a combination of exhilaration and running out of air, I absolutely roared the lyrics “AND I LOST THE KEY!!!!” It felt better than any time I’d every screamed out Green Day lyrics in my life. Cranking up the CD player, or singing along in the car, even standing on the barrier and shouting along cannot compare to the way it felt to be singing as part of the song.

I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face and with every step I took it got wider. The more I walked on that stage the more I felt entirely comfortable up there. I was singing for motherfucking Green Day. This was something I’d always dreamed about and here I was, albeit badly, doing it. However I can’t stress enough how ridiculously hard it was for me to breathe. I kept forgetting that it was necessary, and would always find myself short of breath and unable to keep singing, and I didn’t help myself out in the slightest as I went running around the stage, wildly and jerkily scanning the stage for Jeff without much thought or arrangement and only when it would periodically pop into my head to look. I struggled through the chorus, really only articulating every second or third word and ran up the steps to Tre.

At this point in time, I was practically a stranger to the group of Australians I met up with later on the tour, but I was luckily included in their discussions and planning online. What they had together was what they called their “Green Day family”. I’d first been put into contact with Kerry Harris through Amber, who was someone that I knew from geekstinkbreath.net. I spoke to Kerry on facebook chat one night, and I must have made a good impression, because she fired off friend suggestions to all her girls and within the next two days every single one of them had added me. When they first found me online I was delivering a pizza to a house out on the highway, practically in the middle of nowhere. My phone was constantly going off with facebook notifications to the tune of “Mechanical Man” which went a long way in making this isolated house seem ten times creepier than it actually was. When I’d delivered the pizza, before starting the car I took the time to clear off my messages. My eyes prickled with some indescribable emotion when I realised that I was getting wall post after wall post of “Welcome to the family”.

In the next couple of days following that I really tried hard to keep up with their crazy Europe thread. I also attempted to talk to each one of them at some point on chat to try and get a mental picture of who everybody was. On one such occasion, I had a discussion with Maha Raslan about everybody’s role in the “family”, to which we jokingly decided that I was the new pet goldfish, and everyone was excited and interested to watch me swimming about in my tank. I thought it was a good metaphor for me at that stage, caught up in the middle of this crazy world, but still alone, with glass between me and everyone else.

One of those very early days spent in the Europe thread, when Kerry had been introducing me to everyone, and helping outline a brief amount of background information and just the basic dynamics of the group. “Rule number one” Kerry had written “Tre is mine. Remember that, and nobody gets hurt.”

I felt like I effortlessly sprung up those steps. And Tre positively beamed at me as I got closer. It struck me immediately how life-like he was. In the pictures it didn’t seem possible that a person could actually be that animated, but that’s the way he is. He was absolutely bouncing on the drum stool, nodding in encouragement at me and smiling the craziest smile I’ve ever witnessed. I was so ready to climb around the drums to hug him, or jump into his lap, or steal some of his drink – anything. Suddenly, though, that little rule number one flashed through my head and I thudded to a halt. Tre and I grinned at each other for a moment and then I decided not to touch him. I’d leave it all to Kerry. So I turned around and pumped my fist up into the air and went to go down the steps again.

I realised I was doing something wrong when Billie turned around to look at me. Then I realised I’d missed a line and hurried to get it out before he kicked me off. I cut in at “motivation, where is my motivation” and ran off towards Jason’s side of the stage. As I passed Billie Joe he gave me a smile that I will never forget as long as I live, a smile that said he was enjoying what I was doing. It was a mental high-five and it boosted my already ridiculously high spirits.

As the brief musical interlude before the third verse played, I made my way over to centre stage again. I’d given Helsinki absolutely everything I had at that point and I felt as if I would collapse if I took one more step or said one more word. I was exhausted, my arms had gone numb as if I’d been holding something heavy for a long time, and I was as out of breath as if I’d just ran a marathon but so exhilarated and so happy. I sat down on the steps onto the catwalk and looked out at the crowd, just letting everything sink in. I took a couple of breaths and decided that I could manage to do the rest, then stood up again and started the third verse.

I hadn’t been paying attention to Billie Joe, or where he was, and he surprised me when he was suddenly right beside me. I turned my head to sing to him, and he brought his face right up to my face to share the microphone with me. I could feel his cheek pressed up against mine, cold from the chill in the air but sweaty from the physical exertion he puts himself through on stage. There are no words to describe how I felt in that moment. None whatsoever and I don’t even think I can begin to explain the sense of absolute and complete happiness that filled me right to the brim. If a person can physically glow, I bet I was doing it then and there.

The end of the song finished in a bit of a blur, and if I hadn’t seen the video I wouldn’t remember it. All I remember is the feel of Billie Joe’s cheek and him yelling out “Sonny and Cher!” and I remember the exhaustion catching up with me and falling to the ground as I finally got out the last few words. Then all I have is Tre nodding at me, telling me to jump from the top of his podium. Everything else between those two things is totally gone from my memory, and kind of speeds past in a bit of a blur when I try to remember it.

Looking down at the stage from the top of Tre’s podium knowing that I had to jump down was one of the most intimidating moments of my life. That jump was terrifying. I was one hundred percent sure that I was going to fall on my face and just die. When my feet safely hit the ground, and I didn’t fall, I was preoccupied with the overwhelming relief at having not face-planted in front of 40 thousand people that it, for a very brief moment, eclipsed the sense of accomplishment, the sense of wonder and amazement at what had just happened. But only for a very brief moment.

I handed the microphone back to Billie Joe and he asked me what my name was. He obviously expected a name that was hard to pronounce, because when he repeated “Liz?” back to me, he over enunciated as if he was trying to wrap his head around multiple and difficult syllables. “Where you from?” had been his next question, and I tried to answer it in a way that predicted his reaction to it. I loaded the word “Australia” with as much “what the fuck?” as I could muster. This disarmed Billie, he had definitely not expected this response.

I felt a little guilty for no other reason than I wasn’t from Finland. It’d been 15 years since Green Day had last played there, and I felt like I’d inadvertently snatched up a little bit of their national glory in terms of Green Day. So I reached forward and grabbed the microphone and changed my mind. I wasn’t from Australia right now, I was from Finland. So I yelled into it “I mean HELSINKI” and laughed as people in the crowd actually applauded me for it. Billie wouldn’t have any of it though. “Fucking Aussies” he said, to an uproarious cheer from the Finnish. I’m sure somewhere he was aware of the national guilt I was experiencing and the potential “ripped off” feeling of others in the crowd. When he said this he looked at me with a smile that reassured me he was kidding, similar to the way you nudge a friend when you make a joke at their expense, and appeased me with a quick round of “Aussie Aussie Aussie!”.

“Now you have to do a stage dive” Billie Joe said and I asked him to wait for just a second, and he laughed at me when I pulled a camera out of my pocket. I expected him to say no, and tell me to just go, so pre-emptively I pleaded with him to let me. I’d said “please, I’m here on my own, just one” and Billie nodded and let me stand next to him and take a picture.

I was on such a high that I didn’t even think about the logistics of stage-diving. I casually walked towards the end of the catwalk and it wasn’t until I saw the crowd and Eddie standing at the end of the runway that I realised I had to run to do this. So I backed up, took a deep breath and plummeted into the pit. I can’t remember jumping, and I can’t remember landing, but I can remember being held up, and the way that that was the perfect way to let everything one hundred percent sink in. Then, fittingly, I sunk into the crowd and fell to my feet in the middle of the pit. The people I landed amongst all patted me on the back, and one lady took a photograph of me. Standing there grinning, utterly overwhelmed.

Somewhere in the moment, lurking in amongst all the craziness, and underlying the happiest moment of my entire life, behind the joy, behind the achievement, behind the disbelief and the absolute pure euphoria, I wished there’d been someone there to share it with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2q2PV9eL2c

Goteborg, Sweden

Goteborg is my favourite city in the entire world.

I came into Sweden riding on the high of discovering Jeff Matika. I’m not going to go right out and say that I became the person I am today in Sweden and because of Jeff, that’s just silly, but I had been on the road long enough to have gained a lot of confidence in myself that I didn’t have when I got on the plane in Sydney in the middle of May and I was really starting to feel that take effect.

Suddenly I was in this amazing new city and for some reason it just felt like it was supposed to be home. It was a huge combination of a lot of things - it’s a generally beautiful city, or if it’s the atmosphere, the people, the food or the shops, and I love it. I love absolutely everything about it, and it has a lot to do with who I had become by the time I got there.  The tour was well and truly underway and I was starting to really feel each moment. My stresses were melting away with every new minute I spent on the road. I pretty much felt as though I could cope with any obstacle that could present itself to me. I was becoming more perceptive of things around me, and much more aware of myself and who I was as a person.

The shows in Norway and Sweden were back to back, so I didn’t have a lot of choice in being rather late to the queue, and that didn’t get me down this time.  Even so, when I arrived at the venue at about 11am and there were already six or seven hundred people queued up; I was a little bit taken aback. It didn’t bother me much though, I was well and truly expecting to not be at the front, and was looking forward to another Hannover-style experience. The fact that there were so many people here already got me excited for the show. There were at the very least 600 people here who were really ridiculously keen to see Green Day. People had apparently started camping out a week before the actual show. I sat in that queue thinking to myself with utter delight “this is going to be crazy!”

For the show itself I ended up far off to the right a little bit past Jason’s piano and in the second row. Things were pretty spaced out around this spot, no one was bunched up too tightly. I made some friends in the pit the way you do when you’re alone and waiting for a show to start. From what I remember of this show, Green Day had the most fun they’d had onstage since the beginning of the leg. In Denmark, it had seemed like it was the best I’d ever seen them play. In Sweden, it was the most fun I’d ever seen them have up until that point. Or at least that’s what it looked like.

Billie Joe seemed like a little kid up on stage – what, with his bright red pants and the bold blue and yellow of the Swedish flag draped across his shoulders like a cape as he ran around the stage with his arms outstretched shouting “SUPER SWEDEEEEEEEN!!” My view of Jason White was entirely obscured, as was the same for my view of Jeff, but periodically, Jason Freese would laugh at something someone had said, and Mike would smile and grin, or nod at some unheard joke to the audience.

For the crowd though, it was an emotional show. Everyone who was around me seemed to really feel every word of every song, and every time someone would scream or yell, it was loaded with the sound of some indescribable passion. A “hell yes!” put into some kind of primal and guttural sound. There were no words, but none were left wanting, because Billie was singing everything we needed to say.

Somewhere in the middle of “Good Riddance” came a moment that only seems to happen at Green Day shows. That rare occaision when there seems like no better thing to do, nothing more appropriate than to just turn around and embrace a stranger. This happened to me in Goteborg. Somewhere near the end of the song a Swedish girl, with white hair so long she could have tucked her braid into her belt, turned to me and just flung herself into my arms to hug out the song, totally overcome with emotion. That, more than anything that has ever happened to me at a show, reinforced for me exactly why I went on tour in the first place.

I’d left Australia as a girl who didn’t know what she wanted out of life and who pretty much knew nothing about herself except that she had no passion but for a little band called Green Day. I’d finished school and decided almost immediately that I couldn’t stand my town and the way my life would be if I stayed there and panned out the way everyone else was running their lives. The idea of sectioning my life off, from the Higher School Certificate to a university degree after which I would be career driven for 5 odd years and then settle down, get married, have kids and live a domestic lifestyle, horrified me right to the core.

As soon as I’d finished school I started working straight away, and I used the money I earned there to follow Green Day around the country when they came back to Australia. I’d remembered how it had felt in 2005 when they left the stage. That sense of emptiness that settles in, after three hours of pure life, that you learn to get used to. Buying my tickets I felt that emptiness biting at me, nagging in the corners of my mind, behind the pleasure at the idea of seeing Green Day again, and that was the moment when I actually first considered the idea of touring with any kind of seriousness.

The Australian tour rolled around and I ended up doing 5 shows instead of the 3 I’d received tickets for as a birthday gift. I’d bought extra tickets last minute out of sheer panic. I wasn’t ready to face life without them yet. I wasn’t ready for that post American Idiot feeling to come back, and running from that I’d bought my extras. I faced the last show with a combined sense of excitement and misery, and when it finally came to a close, I’d cried so much that my ribs were aching and I could barely breathe. Faced with that reality of a dreary “normal” life, stuck in my dead end town, rotting until the next brief affair with an eventful and fulfilling fantasy, I gave up and accepted it with bitterness and regret that would have driven me insane.

 A couple of nights after that show I’d just finished putting together a scrap book photo album of the tour I’d just completed, and I was sitting on my bed sketching out ideas for a tattoo to commemorate what I’d considered to be the very first  two weeks of my life. I was fully aware that Green Day, right at that very moment, would be playing a show in New Zealand, and I was following the hours tick by in my head, imagining the setlist and mourning the loss of the experience. I can’t pinpoint where the trail of thought began, but suddenly I felt defiant of mediocre. It abruptly wasn’t enough somehow, and almost of its own accord my hand started writing out a calendar, the days between me and the beginning of the European tour. I spent maybe twenty minutes looking up prices of varying things and then when I wrote down a number, a solid and reachable deadline, I knew in my heart that I’d reached the point of no return. I was metaphorically standing at a borderline, that if I crossed it, I couldn’t turn back.  In a split second decision that settled over me like a vow, I barged straight on through the boundary. What had started as a spark of an idea had flared up deep in the back of my brain, and it started a fire that since that very moment never went out.

The months that followed were filled with long hours and thousands of sacrifices, but for the first time in my life I was working towards something and I knew where I was headed. I slogged through a monumental task of organisation, the money I was earning being spent as soon as I had in my hands. I was buying new tickets every other night, booking flights and hotels every single day. I spent more time with the travel agent than I did with my friends and more time at work than I spent being consciously aware of myself as a person inside my own head.

So when I left Australia, I’d known nothing but school and then work. I had no real sense of who I was or sense of a greater direction other than making it to this tour.  I was the shell of nothing but an idea, a dream, and that’s all I had ever been. I’d never known another kind of passion or another kind of drive aside from going to Green Day, and for up until then that was enough.

When I’d begun the tour, in one way or another I lost that sense of direction and it sent me scrambling around looking for an identity. I’d never noticed until it was gone, but working towards making my Green Day fantasy a reality was there in the place of a solidly defined personality, and when I landed in Europe without that goal anymore, having achieved it, I was stripped of everything that made me Liz up until that point. In Sweden I replaced that pseudo-Liz with a real Liz. That’s why, I guess, I loved it there so much. I finally came to terms with the reality of what I had been able to achieve and the necessity to move on from that. Being there and doing everything I’d aimed for rather than chasing it down became the centre of my universe.

By all means it didn’t end there, if anything it opened my eyes up to how lost I really was somewhere beneath compulsory life. All it took was a choice, and the action to follow through with it, to kick start the process. Those days in Sweden, something shifted in my consciousness somewhere, and I really started to feel things and get in touch with the person buried underneath the goal for the first time. Suddenly I had a whole new adventure to embark upon.

The night in Oslo, watching Jeff with Mike had shown me one thing. There was somewhere out there where everybody just fit. That meant for me too there was a place where everything I was, and everything I ever wanted to be would be perfectly fine, and perfectly enough. He’d shown me that yes, yes you could do that, and you could just walk right in and match right up. In a manner of speaking, Jeff woke up the Liz in my head who never thought that was possible.

The fact that overnight something had happened that changed my entire headspace is just a taste of the impact the tour would have on me as a whole. Jeff was just the beginning of that, and seeing him in a different element ultimately altered the way I thought of myself, the way I approached the shows and realistically the way I thought of Green Day.

Basically my whole world had been stirred up and shifted in the space between Norway and Sweden and it all made me think about what I had managed to do. Stripped of a goal and faced with a breathtaking reality, everything blew up and then settled down in a slightly different place and it felt better this way. It was as though a little bit of light had been shed on some irritating mystery. I was now making my way around the world doing what I loved to do more than anything else. Newly aware of this new person that was lurking somewhere, trapped in my mind waiting to be found, sure that somewhere along the way I would find where I could let her out.

Goteborg is my favourite city in the entire world because of that.

Oslo, Norway

This show was the first show for this leg of the tour that Idiot Club was running an early entry contest for, and I was lucky enough to win this contest, and I was so excited when I got my email. Maybe I should have used the extra time I had to look around the city, but instead I opted for a relaxed morning cleaning conjunctivitis out of my eye, which I was absolutely thrilled about.

Even though my early entry meant I didn’t have to line up, and I didn’t have to be at the venue until 3.45, I was anxious about it, as I wasn’t 100% on how this was all going to work. I ended up heading down to the venue at about 11 just to be sure. Around about midday and 1pm some other early entry people started to show as well, and we all sort of wandered around together being confused about what was going on, me being confused and not speaking even one word of Norwegian and them being confused as to why we were all speaking English today.

Here I met Ingrid, and I was absolutely enthralled by her stories about Foxboro Hot Tubs. She’d flown out to England on the spur of the moment in October the year before to catch them in London, and by doing so had missed her own birthday party, which still took place (at her house) as she didn’t get a chance to tell all the invitees about her absence.  I hung on her every word when she talked about the Tubbies. One of my favourite things to do is listen to people talk about Foxboro Hot Tubs shows. I feel like a little kid listening to some mindblowing fantasy every time someone brings it up. I just can’t get enough of it. She could have gone on about it all day and I would have sat at her feet listening with undivided attention. This aspect of Green Day remains shrouded in a little bit of glorified mystery in my head, and I listen to stories about them with a sense of disbelieving awe. It’s something that I still can’t wrap my mind around, and something that I desperately hope to experience at least once in my life.

The Early Entry Line was a lot of fun; I had some really great chats in this line up about everything from music theory with Erik Sti, to some of the girls’ stories about meeting Mike Dirnt at a Coffee shop and some others who had met Billie outside his hotel.

As it got closer and closer to 3:45 we started to get a little anxious in that the guy who won the main prize of the competition, to co-ordinate with Green Day security in running the early entry, would not show up. We started to worry that we were in the wrong place. Eventually someone came to get us. He was quite young and friendly, and had an American accent. This was enough proof in everyone’s mind that he was with Green Day, and no one needed any more evidence. Later I would learn that this man’s name was Dan. Dan took us to a different gate and said he was going to look for the guy who won, but that it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t show up and we’d get in anyway.

Where Dan had us waiting we could see straight through to the stage. We could SEE the soundcheck. It was fairly relaxed for most of the time we were there, and we were free to wander around and try and get a better look, which we all did. There was a moment there when a group of strangers stood around together all equally freaking out and flailing to “Murder City”.

It wasn’t until much later that we were all grouped together in one of those line-up barrier boxes that make you feel like cattle. Getting moved into an organised line sent our energy levels up to the max and we all were suddenly ridiculously wired up and ready to go in. Increasing our levels of enthusiasm, sometime after sound check, Jason White suddenly appeared across from us. There was literally nothing between him and us except Dan and our little rail. He stood back and watched what was going on with what looked like genuine curiosity and responded rather shyly to the shouts of “OH MY GOD, JASON!” and the huge smiling faces and exuberant and uncoordinated waves. Then just as suddenly as he’d appeared, he was gone.

When Dan let us into the stadium we were fairly calm about it, there was probably only 20 of us and we ran just for the thrill of it. Being on the barrier of an empty stadium had a kind of eerie feel to it, and watching it fill up around us was even stranger. Being able to experience the madness of the gates opening from a position inside the venue showed me how crazed and animalistic we look when we get let through and try to get to our spots as fast as we can without running. I’d almost be less intimidated if everyone actually was running towards us, rather than struggling with the idea of wanting to. Watching this group of people half-restrained by the instructions of security made everyone look as though they were about to transform into ravenous and unstoppable werewolves, and that they knew it.

At this show, Billie started his tradition of calling the East Jesus Nowhere Kid “Buddy” as the kid told Billie his name about 4 times, and every time Billie would pronounce it wrong. In the end he just gave up and shouted “From now on your name is Buddy”. Furthermore, for the first time ever, as far as I am aware of, Billie Joe pulled someone up during “King For a Day” to dance with the feather boa around himself and Jason Freese during their little kazoo-saxophone solo-off. I was delighted to see that this girl was Ingrid, my fellow early entry-er and extreme Foxboro Hot Tubs fan. It’s always more exciting when you’ve been talking to someone in the line all day who later ends up on stage.

 After the concert it was still daylight. That was the weirdest thing about it to me, so it seemed natural to just go for a walk and take a look around. It seemed like it was only about 5pm, so I didn’t feel weird or unsafe in the slightest hanging around the trucks watching them pack up the spectacle. I went for a walk around the venue looking for a merch stand, I wasn’t going to buy anything, but I thought I might have a look. I did an entire loop around the stadium and found nothing, so I decided to go back around to where they were bringing out all the equipment and just watch. By then a lot of the crowd had dispersed and it was actually rather quiet around this side of the Stadium, so I felt a bit awkward sitting there watching them on my own so I decided to do another loop of the Stadium before heading back to the hotel for the night, by this time it had finally gotten dark.

The way the stadium was set up was that from the gates outside you could see straight through to the stage. Mostly these gates were where the crowd was let in, and this was why we were able to get such a clear view of the sound check, but one side of the stadium was all sealed off by glass, and this was the entrance to the VIP room, but you could still see straight through onto the grounds, and because this was an indoors entrance it was still well lit up. I could see that there was nothing in there, and I would have walked straight past, but just at the right moment a group of people turned onto the corridor and were walking towards the VIP room (so basically straight up the corridor towards me).

I wouldn’t have taken much notice of them, it was just a group of guys having a laugh, but one stood out from all the rest. It was the haircut that made him recognisable – short and black, with one side flipped over to the right. I remember thinking to myself, “oh hey! It’s Jeff..? It’s Jeff!” And I stopped walking to watch him.  I don’t know what it was that entranced me first, if it was the way he was walking, the smile on his face, or the way he was laughing, but I was absolutely transfixed from the moment I recognised him. I remember thinking “Wow, He is really going to be somebody.” It took me a good half a minute to notice that Mike and Tre were with him too. And as soon as I realised he was with them it made me watch him even closer.

Suddenly the fact that this group of people were all laughing together, walking together, making jokes and punching each other on the shoulders like a bunch of high school kids really struck me hard, and I watched just how well Jeff, this new guy, fit in with motherfucking Green Day. And that’s what got me about him. That’s what started it all. Watching Jeff absolutely a part of this group, absolutely belonging right where he was, unquestionably one of the guys, is what got me hooked. I sat down on the pavement across the road and watched them walk down this corridor. And I sat running over my memories of Jeff from the concerts I’d seen him at, paying a little more attention than usual, lingering on the moments when I’d watched him, figuring him out.

The fact that there was this guy who played guitar, who was so damn good at what he did that it got him a gig with Green Day was one thing, but the fact that he fit in so well with such an established group of people, and that he was able to appear so comfortable within that group made me extremely jealous. It kind of blew me away that somebody could actually do that, because it was something I’d never been able to do – rely on some talent or amazing attribute of my personality to be enough to just slide and fit perfectly into a group of people where I could feel as at home as Jeff had looked walking down that corridor. I admired him so much in that moment for what I had just seen that I was entirely preoccupied with nothing but that feeling. Sitting alone in the dark in Oslo, Norway, I found somebody to look up to. Jeff Matika was the first piece of myself that I found along the way on this crazy adventure. Sitting there in the gutter I found the part of me that wanted to be somebody, and I guess from that moment on I was the Jeff Girl.

And as much as I wish I could end this chapter with that, the very nature of this tour prevents being able to section things off so neatly. More than discovering Jeff Matika happened that night outside the VIP room.

Having just watched them pile into the VIP room, I admit I stayed where I was hoping to catch a glimpse of them on the way out. It wasn’t long before Tre came out of the room and stood in the hallway on the phone. He was wearing black pants; a Blazer-style black leather jacket and he had his hair slicked back in a very Elvis-esque style do. What stood out more than anything that he had bright red rubber thongs (or flip-flops, for my American friends) forced onto his feet over the top of big woolly black socks. He walked around in little circles talking on his cell, and when the call ended he thrust open the door to the VIP room and flung himself back inside in a move quite reminiscent of Jim Carey. Moments later he re-emerged and went sliding down the hallway with exaggerated, goofy, disjointed motions, as if he was learning to ski. The rubber on linoleum meant he kept skidding to a premature halt, and frustrated by this he kicked both thongs off his feet and slid the rest of the way in his socks. At this point I just want to remind you that he was entirely alone, and was not aware that he was being watched at all…

Delighted by what I had just seen, I skipped off chuckling back to the hotel, making the most of what would be left of the darkness, with my head full of Jeff Matika and Tre and his rubber thongs.

Skive, Denmark

Coming into Denmark, it didn’t take me long to figure out that Skive was a town out the back of nowhere. Organising my trip to the festival took a lot of connections. I landed in Copenhagen and then got onto a very small almost hobby-sized aircraft which carried me north to Karup, where I had to wait for a bus to Viborg, the town where I was staying, and then I had to catch a train from Viborg to Skive on the day of the festival.

Landing in Karup was weird. The airport looked like an abandoned military base and there were buildings and shipping containers being overrun by the grass. The main building didn’t feel much like an airport at all. It was tiny and had that feel of a local bank.

I walked outside and waited at the bus stop. I had the timetable printed off and ready, and I knew which bus I needed to get on, but there was a fair wait ahead. I sat on the steps near the bus stop soaking up the sun and listening to Bullet in a Bible on my iPod. After the rain in Holland and cold in Germany I was delighted by the warmth. It was actually feeling like summer here.

The time went rather quickly and gradually the minutes ticked nearer and nearer to 4, when my bus would be arriving. Then the minutes ticked past four, and then further and further away. The bus was nowhere to be seen. By 20 past four I gave up on the bus. And I was frustrated, and remember wondering if anything would run on time at all in this hemisphere, but not anxious like in Landgraaf. This wouldn’t matter, it would just be annoying. There were taxis around everywhere earlier, and if all else failed I could walk the ten kilometres into the main town of Karup and pick up a bus to Viborg there. I was in a good mood that day, so it didn’t bother me much. I was keen on making things work, and having just seen Green Day twice, and being on my way to see them again tomorrow, it was really hard to let a tiny little thing like a bus drag down my high spirits. Besides it was so sunny, who wants to be pissed off in the sunshine?

The good weather lasted out for the entire time I was in Denmark. My hotel, more of a bed and breakfast, which shared premises with a large Clydesdale and a couple of pigs, was situated right on the river and was the most relaxing place I’ve ever been to. On the day of the show the early morning walk through to the train station took me through farms, a national park and across the river where colourful boats were docked and into the city which was already bustling with life. Many people rode past on bicycles with cane baskets attached to the handles. Everyone would say the Danish equivalent to good morning to me, and those who didn’t would at the very least tip their hat as they went by me, or nod a greeting in my direction.

I didn’t need to be able to read the timetable to know which train was mine. The station was packed full of teenagers with camping supplies. They’d all been grocery shopping and many carried more than their own weight of food and drink. I squeezed myself onto the train and was wedged in a corner to wait until everyone piled off at Skive. Once walking from the train station in Skive along the coastline to the festival ground, the wait for the gates began. My ticket was transformed into a wristband, as was customary at festivals and I sat down to wait it out while the people in the ticketing booth blasted the same Rhiannon album all morning.

The stage was set up parallel to the beach and later Billie Joe mentioned on stage how beautiful the view was from his perspective. There was no cover from the sunshine at all, and I still have the tan I got from sitting against the barrier all day in Denmark. I find it rather ridiculous to think that I came from Australia, paler than the moon and ended up getting a tan in Scandinavia. I took one break from where I was sitting in the afternoon to go and get something to eat. This was something I always worried about, if I’d be able to communicate with only English. In Scandinavia this wasn’t a problem in the slightest. Everyone was ridiculously friendly and all of them spoke English.  The man at the booth, intrigued by my English, asked me where I was from, and he responded with “Australia? I thought they spoke Spanish there” and he disappeared into the back of the stall.

That day Green Day played the best show I’d ever seen them do. I will always remember it as being one of my favourites. Everything seemed to go right for them and we all had such an amazing time on the barrier. Before the show had started, early in the day, a group of people had started a conversation with me, seeing that I as alone. I ended up spending the entire day with these guys and we made signs and requests together for the show. A line of five of us all had “Letterbomb” written on our arms and, in consecutive order, a letter on each hand. I had T and T on mine. “Letterbomb” was Bastian’s favourite song, and he wanted nothing more than to hear it live, and we all decided that it was a worthy request.

We would co-ordinate and flash our body art at Billie Joe whenever he looked our way, and after Mike pointed it out to him, it earned us all a proper soaking with the water gun when it came out in the middle of the show. Eventually caving to our constant requests, during “King for a Day” Billie Joe rolled over onto his back and before going into “Hey Jude” he sung “She said I can’t take this place, I’m leaving it behind”.

We couldn’t believe it, and we all screamed and high-fived appropriately.

At this point in the tour it was the 9^th time I’d seen Green Day live and having pushed through all the stages of overwhelming disbelief at being on tour, I didn’t expect to be overcome by emotion again at any stage. That seems foolish to think about now, after the entire tour, but my frame of mind at that point did not expect to cry at Green Day again. Up until this point, I’d sobbed like a little girl up in the stands when they came on stage in Adelaide, which was the first time I’d seen them after 5 years of heartbreaking waiting between shows. I’d also cried in Sydney, which was the first time I’d been up close and near them and it was so much more than overwhelming. I’d also descended into a ridiculous emotional wreck at the last show in Australia as I’d desperately screamed “thank you” to Mike Dirnt, when I’d thought it was the end until the next album. So standing here in Denmark with 26 shows still to go, I did not expect any kind of water works. But oh, oh Billie Joe Armstrong, he can always get you, one way or another, whether you’re prepared for it or not.

At the very end of the show, as you probably all know, Billie Joe comes out on stage to finish up the show alone and acoustically. Sometimes the full band will cut back in during “Wake Me Up When September Ends” or “Last Night on Earth” and then disappear again for Billie to finish it all up with “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”

Billie stepped out in the spotlight; his face lowered focusing on the neck of his guitar. He strummed once or twice and then brought his head up to the microphone, flipping his hair out of his eyes, and sang “words get trapped in my mind…” It doesn’t seem like such a huge deal now, “When It’s Time” having generally replaced “Last Night on Earth” on the setlist for the rest of the tour, but this was the very first time on this leg, and the very first time I ever heard it performed, and it was just as unexpected as “It’s Fuck Time” later that month in Mainz.

Amalie (who was E and R in the word “Letterbomb”) and I looked at each other for one brief moment and I absolutely dissolved into tears as I belted out the words along with my newly found Letterbomb companions. I can’t even explain why it is that this song got me, it just did, the way things sometimes do.

Online later that week, Amalie posted on my facebook wall “It was so awesome to share such an emotional experience with someone I barely know. Just standing there in the crowd, crying over Billie’s beautiful words. Thank you so much for a wonderful day.”

I just don’t think I could ever sum it up any better than that.

Hannover, Germany

Getting to Hannover was, for lack of a better word, a disaster. All hell broke loose at approximately 5.35am on the 30^th of May when it became apparent that the train that was supposed to carry me from Landgraaf to Aachen (where my train to the airport left at 6:13am) was not going to arrive.

The platform had about 7 people on it waiting for the same train, and we were all looking at each other with expressions ranging from nervous to horrified, and none speaking enough of a common language to figure out what was going on we couldn’t really do anything but look at each other, point at our watches and shrug with disdain. Eventually, in extremely fractured English, we planned to share a taxi to the next station on the line and try our luck there for other trains. I’m not sure if there was a better way than how things turned out, but it seemed no matter how I went about it, I wasn’t going to make it to Aachen in time to connect to the airport in time to get my flight to Hannover.

Once finally on a train to Aachen I called my Mum back in Australia to see what she could do online to change my flight to a later one. This was a decision that hurt me in a lot of ways. This was the day of the show, The Holland show and the German show taking place on back to back nights, and I was already horrified at the idea of getting into Hannover at 1pmish to start queuing, and it seemed that the only other available option didn’t leave the airport until 1pm and didn’t get in until 4.47pm, as I had to connect in Munich. It was the last resort and it broke my heart but I resigned myself to being well and truly at the back of the line, and at the back of the venue for the show. I was also annoyed at myself because my planned route to the airport hadn’t played out the way I had hoped, and I was frustrated that I’d had to call someone to help me.

Things got worse however, when that last-resort flight at 1pm was delayed. When I finally boarded I was so on edge, and the anxiety kept building every time I looked at the time. However, fears I didn’t even consider were realised when we hit bad weather coming into Munich, where i was connecting,  and the pilot announced that we wouldn’t be able to land on the scheduled time as we had to circle in the air for close to 20 minutes before finally touching down. In the air, the American man I was sitting next to looked at his watch and stated to his wife that he wasn’t sure they would make their connection. Shakily I asked him what time his flight left and it was 5 minutes after mine. His answer made my heart sink right down to the ground we were circling above, as I figured I’d be lucky to arrive in Hannover in time for the show at all, let alone catch my 3.30 flight out of Munich. He asked me where I was headed, and what time, and he was fascinated by my explanation. He’d heard of Green Day and confessed to being one of the “ignorant fans – I know nothing about them”, and said “I wish I could make it to the show!” at which point I replied “So do I”.

Despite running through the terminal faster than i’ve ever run, I still missed the connecting flight out of Munich. I managed to cut the line to get my boarding pass updated by pouncing on a young employee who had pretty much been verbally assaulted by an angry passenger and had stepped out from behind his counter to try and placate the man. As soon as he had gone to complain to the manager, I asked the employee if I was in the right line, and after being so publicly undermined he was very eager to please his next customer, and fixed my pass for me straight away.

I arrived in Hannover at about 7pm and caught a 40 euro taxi to straight to my hotel, where I asked the taxi to wait while I checked in, dumped my bags and ran back outside, then went straight to the venue, where the doors were already open, and the crowd all well and truly inside. As late as I was I did manage to get really close to the barrier. There were only 1 or 2 in front of me, but it was on the end of the catwalk, which is a really unstable part of the pit as far as keeping your spot goes. I managed to stay there for at least half of the set. Unbeknownst to me at the time, but Denise and Sven both got on stage for this show, and when I finally met them I was excited to hear the stories of people who I always thought would be strangers. And as luck would have it, I must have been standing right behind them.

 The pit was fairly calm for the first part of the show, but when they cracked out “Nice Guys Finish Last” and “Burnout”, everyone, including me, absolutely lost their shit.  It was as if someone had set a nuke off in the crowd, as we all were overcome by this unexpected surprise, and embraced it with as much life as was possible. I was delighted by how ballistic the pit got, and the overruling emotion during these songs was incredibly wild.

Everyone seemed to jump up and down in double time, yelling and screaming like barbarians, arms flailing all over the place, people falling and being propelled up by unseen strangers, under some kind of unspoken code of mutual respect, or mutual annoyance at falling and being fallen on. No one seemed to care about watching the band during this song, and it didn’t matter if you could see them or not, but it was impossible to stand still.

There were constant surges of movement in every direction as some tried to make their way closer to the front, as others pushed back in defiance of their efforts and others still went wildly thrashing about and screaming their lungs out, entirely oblivious to anyone around them, utterly lost in their own mind, their own thoughts and memories and own passions for Green Day and their “old shit”. To this day, I still stand by my statement that “Nice Guys Finish Last” in Hannover was the most high-octane and exhilarating and roughest pit atmospheres I’ve ever been involved in, and I’ve got the chipped tooth to prove it.

As much as “Nice Guys Finish Last” and “Burnout” awoke the wild side of Germany, I’ll always remember “Jesus of Suburbia” as just as epic of a moment and one of my favourite Green Day show memories. I found myself standing with a group of very drunk German Green Day fans who were pounding out every word with the drunken swagger of a sporting anthem. By the time “I Don’t Care” rolled around we all had our arms around each other in an almost American Idiot Musical kind of stance, and even though none of us knew each other, even though I didn’t speak German and they spoke no English whatsoever, it didn’t matter at all. Because there’s something about these songs and this music that connects us all in one way or another, and the fact that we can belt out those words and mean them, for whatever reason, with every ounce of strength we’ve got left at that late stage in the performance is all we’ll ever need to bring us Green Day fans together.

Landgraaf, Holland

 It had been approximately 5 months, 14 days, 5 hours and 27 minutes since I’d spent two weeks following Green Day around Australia and watched them walk off the stage for the last time, and before that it’d been nearly 5 years to the day since I’d last seen them live. My five concerts in December seemed like that first cigarette after years of cold turkey. I wanted more, and I needed it as soon as possible. Every fibre of my being was itching for another hit. The fact that I finally had my arms wrapped over the barrier again, and that I could see the familiar set up of the stage, the jizz canon innocently tucked away amongst equipment just in front of me, and hear the sounds of “Surrender” blasting over the stereo, was reinforcing in my mind that this was really happening. It was all teasing my senses, I knew exactly how close they were, and it was driving me crazy.

 I was in Landgraaf, Holland, at Pinkpop Festival where Green Day would be headlining the main stage. I’d been standing where I was since the gates to the festival ground opened at 11am, and Green Day were due to hit the stage at 8.30pm. I could feel sunburn across my face, and I was feeling lightheaded and dizzy with a little bit more than anticipation, considering I’d been surrounded by a group of festival goers who were very much taking advantage of the legality of certain substances in Holland.

 I was alone that day, having been separated in the morning from Stephanie and Sheila, two girls from the Idiot Club who I was sharing a tent with back on the festival grounds, and this fact allowed me to be a little more exuberant in my excitement as I didn’t have to worry about freaking anyone out too much to let me back into the tent later on in the evening. I could feel the excitement burning in the pit of my stomach. I was eagerly throwing my head around trying to catch a shufti of skinny-jean clad legs running in circles, or trying to chance a premature glimpse of a giant pink bunny as the playlist brought us closer and closer to the moment we’d all been waiting for.

 The Bunny stumbled out and went largely unnoticed until he was centre stage, where he was greeted with an uproarious reception. This was it. This was the beginning of it all. That unknown man in a pink bunny suit warmed the crowed up rather unnecessarily. We’d all been watching bands all day - some good and some…not - and many of us were drunk and or stoned and those who weren’t were thoroughly high off the atmosphere. The pit area was packed solidly full of Green Day fans who were absolutely wild with joy, the way Green Day fans generally are at a Green Day show. We were already well prepared to enjoy Green Day’s spectacle, and thus excited to embrace the antics of that giant Pink Bunny with much enthusiasm.

 If we weren’t outside the lights would have blacked out. But the sun was still blaring, and the whole stage was visible. I could see crew bustling around backstage getting ready and I was hysterically shouting along to the Ramones. The last chords of “Rock and Roll Radio” thudded to a halt and the silence that followed only lasted a split second before the crowd positively erupted with cheers and shouts. The roar was deafening and it drowned out the static of “Song of the Century”. The noise of this crowd was unbelievable, I couldn’t even hear Billie’s voice up until “contraband”, but by then I had already transformed into a desperate madman. I could feel the months of anticipation and planning, the racing between jobs, the almost sleepless nights spent darting around town on deliveries, every time I swallowed the words “I quit” or “fuck you” and everything I’d done to be standing in this very place I felt welling up inside, and in this moment all the work that I had done to get here ceased to matter. My whole life was about to walk out on stage and I was just about ready to explode with the reality of it.

 When “Song of the Century” faded away, the crowd held the note as long as they could. Due to the loudness of the singing along and the emotion that loaded the phrase, it came out fractured and out of tune and it faded out with a non-distinct ending and was perhaps cut off by the breaking point of anticipation, when everyone erupted into frenzied screams. The volume and intensity of the screaming multiplied tenfold at the crashing opening of “21st Century Breakdown” and I felt lost, darting my head around looking for them, but at the same time slamming my eyes shut to keep from bursting into overwhelmed and happy tears.

 They were nowhere to be seen. I had to let my head drop into my hands and pull at my hair, flailing around unable to control the excitement. I jumped in a tiny little staccato, up and down, yelling as the screaming got louder and louder and defying possibility the crowd seemed to crescendo as Green Day came into view. Suddenly they were all right there, everything I’d ever wanted and everything I’d strived for I had actually accomplished. I was here, on tour, and they were right in front of my eyes, finally. It seemed almost like a silent moment, cut off from all sound entirely as Billie Joe jumped into the song and the show begun. As I tried to shape my frantic screaming into the lyrics of “21st Century Breakdown”, I burst into tears at the overwhelming cocktail of emotions and I thought to myself “Oh my god, Billie’s wearing RED pants!!!!”

 And so it began.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLZDSMnJjpM

I’ve always found non-fiction to be rather boring. When I read anything, I like it to bear as little resemblance to the real world as possible. Because let’s face it, the real world is rather dull. There’re cars, and a thousand shades of gray, the sounds of electronics and blurring traffic, business chatter on cell phones, narrow minded money-making and overwhelming greed. The real world is nothing but a daily mind numbing routine and a depressing lack of humanity. Who wants to read about that?

 I like my stories full of danger and dinosaurs and great and noble quests. I like tales of magic, and long lost a faraway worlds. Of heroes, of thieves and bandits, of hobbits and Neville Longbottom – that’s what I want to read about - adventure.

 So this story is unlike anything I ever imagined could happen in the real world, not even in my wildest dreams. Granted, there aren’t any dinosaurs, but there’s adventure, and danger, there’s faraway lands and magic by the bucket load. This is the introduction to my story. My story about the months I spent chasing down my favourite band as they travelled the world on their tour, and how I found myself along the way.