Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
It’s 10am in California and Green Day drummer Tré Cool is making his coffee and about to drill down with NME into Nimrods, the new feature film comedy inspired by the band. “One second,” he says. “Sorry, there’s a fight on the street here. You know, it’s America. They’re always fighting in the streets.” His interest is piqued by an altercation outside his window. “Oh, that guy just hit the other guy in the face. Oh, now Grandma just got involved… slamming with her purse. Oh boy, you never know what you’re gonna get.”
It’s the sort of everyday roughhousing you might find in Nimrods: A Green Day Comedy, to give it its full title. Don’t expect a typical biopic here – one that might show the band forged in the late-’80s Bay Area punk scene, releasing debut album ‘Dookie’ in 1994 – or, for that matter, winning five Grammys and selling a staggering 75million records. Rather, Nimrods comes inspired by the early, scrappy adventures of Cool, bassist Mike Dirnt and lead guitarist/vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong.
From an idea originally formulated by Armstrong, Nimrods is a wild coming-of-age road movie, as a trio of teenagers – Tommy (Mason Thames), Fred (Kylr Coffman) and Chad (Ryan Foust) – are pranked into heading to LA under the belief that their band Analog Dogs is about to open for Green Day. Cool and his bandmates fed director Lee Kirk anecdotes from their pre-‘Dookie’ days. “It’s not a mirror image but is it is definitely a fuzzy reflection of us,” says Cool. “We’re a part of these kids, and they’re a part of us.”
With the band even cameoing (at an in-store that Tommy and co. crash), it’s really a love letter to their legions of fans. “I mean, we love them, and I guess it is a special relationship we have with them,” says Cool, 53. “I’ve been to shows and seen other bands’ fans and it’s not that our fans are crazier or better looking… which they are, very much so! But they’re so cross generational. There’s different age groups of fans. We’re their band and it’s a part of a culture of misfits that belong together.”
“A lot of them were cooked into the script. Like the severed head… that actually happened. We stayed at this guy’s house, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I want you to meet my friend Sleepy.’ We’re in Copenhagen. And he pulls his frickin’ human head in a jar out of his closet. He’s like, ‘You can’t tell anyone I have this!’ And we’re like, ‘Holy fuck!’ And then he set it down, and we were all sleeping on the floor next to this head. It was pretty scary.”
“Yeah, I would say. I mean, that’s what people would say about us. We were just us. There was no barometer because we were just this traveling pack of banshees that just behaved in our way, and we just did our thing, and we didn’t realise that other people weren’t like us, I guess. We were just all batshit crazy, and we gravitated to other people that were similar, other bands and creatives and stuff. So it becomes a scene at that point. I guess you call it wild in comparison to some other people.”
“We stayed away from that. We let Lee and company handle that because… he’s writing the movie. He should know what the right mood is – and he sure did. And it was a surprise to us when we first saw the screening when the songs came on. There’s a demo version of ‘In the End’… it’s from an old, unreleased demo. And then ‘Haushinka’ being played… that’s awesome. Hearing that song in like a Dolby 7.1 sound system in a theatre, it’s pretty amazing.”
“Yeah. It happens every so often. Every couple of eras, someone’s like: ‘We should make a film about your life.’ Like, we ain’t done yet. We don’t want to sit and look back and spin our wheels, spending our energy talking about what we’ve done when we’re still doing stuff.”
“Absolutely. It’s a relevant movie, and we feel like we’re a very relevant band – and, like I said, we’re not done by any means. So, a biopic story is more of a retirement plan. We’ll do that when we’re actually old and we’re doing our residencies in Las Vegas or something… that’s probably a good time to do it.”
“I’m not going to tell you that!”
“I think it’s probably more talk now that Nimrods is such a hit. It’s great. We’ve shown that we can make records – and apparently we can make movies too. So, let’s do it. We make musicals. We can make ‘Dookie’… every morning!”
“Yeah, just got to do the right [thing]. Come on, we just put out Nimrods! You’re trying to make us make another movie! That’s like as soon as you put a new record out, two weeks later… ‘Oh, you guys gonna go back in the studio?’ Well, look, I’ll tell you this: we’re very proud of ‘American Idiot’, and it’s an incredibly important record to us – and we’re not not talking about it!”
“Yeah. If they ask us. It’s the last great festival that we haven’t done.”
“I just go with what’s on the day sheet! They’re not really calling the drummer!”
‘Nimrods: A Green Day Comedy’ is in UK cinemas now
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Westside Cowboy caught up with NME backstage at Reading 2026 to tell us about their whirlwind year, slapping a smile on the face of modern indie, and hopes for “weirder, poppier” new music.
Fresh from the release of their acclaimed and long-awaited debut album ‘It Goes On‘, the rising Manchester alt-country outfit packed out The Ballroom tent at both Reading and Leeds sites.
This was their first time playing the legendary festival, but singer and guitarist Reuben Haycocks came as a young punter in 2019, their return bringing bad a flood of “PTSD” from that heady weekend. This time through, they were one of the most talked-about acts of the weekend – and certainly one of our highlights.
From winning the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition last year to then smashing Glasto before R+L, does anything phase the recent NME cover stars anymore?
“A lot of things phase us, every day,” replied fellow singer and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury. “It’s a strange one. We have a very lovely team of people around us who help keep us sane. I feel like we’re still playing music with our friends, and that’s the way I hope it stays.”
He continued: “We’re at that stage of a tour now where we’ve been away for a very long time and we’re questioning our own existence. Is this real? Are We real?”
It’s been a whirlwind year for the NME 100 alumni, starting with supporting Geese on tour back in March when they called at London’s iconic Hammersmith Apollo. What was it like to be part of that bubble of hype and madness?
“We were sort of leeching off the bubble,” replied Haycocks. “We were very lucky to get that tour and they were so lovely. Generally the atmosphere of the whole tour was great and all the crowds were amazing. Hammersmith was the first time I ever walked on stage and noticed how big it was. We’re excited to hopefully play our songs to that many people who know them, now that the album is out.”
Bradbury agreed: “That was one of the first stages where you go out and you immediately notice and take in the history that’s been there: Springsteen’s first London concert, the last ever Ziggy Stardurst concert – which I was watching the other day and his guitar player Mick Ronson is amazing. There’s a moment where it’s really dark, the lights flash and you can see Bowie being projected onto the side of that place. It still looks the same as that and it’s an amazing venue.”
Still, the band modestly that admit that the highlight of 2026 so far has simply been putting out their debut album.
“I don’t know if we intended to go this far, but we’re here and we’re liking it,” Bradbury admitted. “There are so many different stages to putting an album together: finding which songs, recording the songs, mixing them, getting your masters back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it!’ Then you get the cover back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it again!’ By the time it comes to releasing it, you feel like you’ve done it already five times. It’s a moment of it finally just clicking together and it’s really exciting.”
Speaking of how it feels to finally have the record out in the universe and have listeners understand their true selves, Haycocks shared: “We’re making an effort to read reviews as little as possible, considering we’re already on tour and questioning our existence. My dad will send me a bit of a review that’s really nice, and then just to ground me he’ll send me a horrible comment, just so I don’t get above my station.”
“We’ve just played, and it was nice to see people sing the words to songs that were sort of new to us. Seeing people with their arms up in the air and knowing these songs that were once just a thought, that’s a pinch-me moment.”
The band recently told NME how their primary focus was “bringing the fun back into the music generally” and “taking everything a little less seriously” in terms of songwriting. It’s rarer than you’d hope to share joy at these hellscape times such as this, but it’s admirable. Have Westside Cowboy felt that reflected back at them?
“We could feel it today,” replied Bradbury, speaking of their Reading performance. “There were bucket hats flying off in the air, people had some lovely signs written. We try and keep it light-hearted. There are so many instances from when we’ve been in bands before where you take it so seriously that you run yourself into the ground. Everybody just really try to let go of that. We wanted to do the best we can with what we have and use as few chords as possible.”
Do they feel more new bands adopting that approach as the world continues its doom spiral?
“There are a lot of new bands that come from the scene we come from that do that amazingly: there’s Pushbike, Bramwell, Holly Head, countless, countless bands that have that idea woven in,” said Haycocks. “It’s really lovely to see bands smiling on stage again. Maybe it was a little fashionable to be smouldering for a while.”
We briefly pause the interview to give us their best ‘blue steel’ smoulder. Their attempt gets points for effort.
“Some people can do that really well, and there are some bands I really love that can do that, but most people – especially those who are similar to us – just look like idiots,” Haycocks continued. “It’s nice to see people smiling and looking like they’re enjoying themselves. This should be the thing they want to do, so show it.”
It may seem a selfish question given that they’ve just dropped one of the year’s best-reviewed albums, and we ask only because we know how restless and unstoppable they are, but are Westside Cowboy already at work on album number two?
“We were driving down to London when the album came out at midnight. We all stood up, shook each other’s hands as the van was moving and went, ‘Cool, we’ve got until we get to the hotel then we’ll start thinking about the next one’,” Bradbury told us. “We’ve got a few things floating around, and we’re excited to crack on with it. We’ve been nattering about it in the van a lot. We’ll kick it around a bit and see where we end up.”
Asked where they were looking to take their sound from here, Haycocks shared: “Currently, we’ve been really, really loving a band called Women, we’ve been listening to loads of The Magnetic Fields and we love The Drums, so we would hope that the next album is both poppier and weirder. You never, ever know how it’s going to turn out until you start doing it.
“We want to just continue the journey that we’ve done from the start. The way I described it to Paddy [Murphy, drummer] the other day was that ‘The mists were appearing’. You can’t quite see it yet, it’s not yet tangible what the second album will be but there’s a faint outline there.”
He added: “You describing us as ‘restless’ is a good descriptor. We really just want to get on it and go.”
‘It Goes On’ by Westside Cowboy is out now, with the band heading out on their biggest UK and European headline tour to date this autumn. Visit here for tickets and more information.
Check back at NME here for all the latest news, reviews, photos, interviews and more from Reading & Leeds 2026.
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