By BRUCE DENNILL
Calabash South Africa 2025 – Green Day, The Offspring, Fokofpolisiekar / FNB Stadium, Soweto
Happily falling on one of three summer’s days so far when it wasn’t raining, Calabash South Africa 2025 brought together a trio of experienced acts with different takes on the punk aesthetic. Cape Town’s Fokofpolisiekar are now relatively sensible adults who are simply very good at what they do, but they’ve been consistently kicking against the straps since they came up with that band name. Californian band The Offspring have been together since 1984 and started a run of chart success in 1994 with Come Out And Play. And Green Day, contemporaries of The Offspring and breaking through around the same time, are something of a cultural force, having enjoyed massive chart success since major label debut Dookie took off in the early Nineties and having conquered the musical theatre world with an adapted version of their protest punk milestone American Idiot. It’s all punk of some description, it all involves considerable dynamism and it all added up to a night of good-natured, high-quality, large-scale musical entertainment.
Fokofpolisiekar begin as they meant to continue with singer Francois Van Coke, bassist Wynand Myburgh and drummer Snake Venter showing complete commitment in their energy, movement, expression – and sweat. Van Coke is all charm, confidence and easy audience engagement at a stadium level. To each side of the stage, giant screens show the band in gritty black and white, giving the footage a feel of heft and authenticity. The band don’t need to manufacture that, mind, as a huge number of fans sing out each word of each song as it is performed. For most of the songs, Van Coke uses a microphone with a cable so he can swing it around for one of his trademark rock star moves, but he switches it for a cordless option when he climbs off the stage and visits the crowd, climbing onto the security barrier and perching there with one foot on the rail and one supported by the willing hands of a couple of fans. He seems as happy and stable there as if he was on a steel plate, a man as sure of his showmanship as he is of his craftsmanship.
The addition to the stage of two giant inflatable skeletons before The Offspring’s set suggests there is going to be both an uptick in scale and a healthy perspective on how seriously the whole spectacle should be taken. The band leaps straight in with Come Out And Play, preferring a stand-and-deliver style notably in contrast with the previous act’s vitality. Singer Dexter Holland’s voice initially sounds fairly compressed, which is not terribly surprising, given where most of the band’s songs are pitched. If that’s a conservative measure, though, it’s immediately balanced out by the crazy-fast polka-punk rhythms provided by Brandon Pertzborn, who must have extra synapses or something to manage all that tight muscle control. Later, streamers, confetti, giant beach balls, pyrotechnics and Noodles playing Sweet Child Of Mine all help get the crowd even more on side than they were for the music alone. It’s big, dumb fun and it also has the effect of giving Dexter’s voice a break between those high-intensity lead vocals. It’s not too cynical to suggest that all of this – plus the cheerful banter between Holland and guitarist Noodles – is part of a plan to keep the pacing of the set at a reasonable level. After all, these two old friends now have an average age of 60 and with the perky Pertzborn almost literally half that age, there needs to be some levelling of the playing field.
The headliners’ set begins with someone in a bunny suit (the kid’s party version, not the Playboy one) prancing about on stage to no great effect, but when the band arrive with their instruments, it’s clear that they will perform with a different level of audio-visual and lighting spectacle, including mock Marshall amplifier stacks with sunken lighting in their frames across the whole width of the stage. Singer Billy Joe Armstrong looks fresh and chipper, wide-eyed and mischievous. Drummer Tre Cool, apparently dressed for a padel tournament at the Mount Nelson, is as quick as he always was and bassist Mike Dirnt holds everything together, with the core Green Day power trio filled out by two extra guitarists and a pianist. The band is tough to look away from, but when they unleash a ‘Badyear’ blimp, led around the golden circle by two more crew members in dog costumes, they confirm that they’re here for fun as well as work. Armstrong is on top form for the entirety of the set, a brilliant frontman, manipulating the crown with the charm of a demanding toddler and wide, slightly crazed eyes. His musicianship matches his flair, particularly when he comes out of quiet parts of songs with perfect pitch having had little or nothing to base his note on. The band’s collective energy never drops and they are super-tight, but there are still hints of the effect of the pure joy of playing pushes the pace slightly (such as in the verses of Minority) before expert adjustment as the band members hear each other clearly again. At around two hours, this is a generous set, especially considering how short many of Green Day’s pop-punk hits are. Playing this concert the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration, some political comment from Armstrong was always a reasonable expectation, and the singer gets there right near the end of the show, bemoaning the influence of “selfish billionaires and their poisonous algorithms” without taking any momentum out of the performance. By the time they finish – with a solo acoustic version of Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) from Armstrong, who gets cuddled by Cool and Dirnt as he plays the last chord – Green Day have ticked every box anyone in the stadium could have wished for, and then some.
A brilliant night as a whole and in its component parts.