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
Share
Advertisement
Would Johnny Marr place one of his solo songs ahead of favourites from The Smiths and Electronic? His choices are revealed in NME’s Blind Ranking video below.
Ahead of the release of ‘The Age Of Everything’, which arrived last Friday, October 2, NME sat down with the guitarist for a look back through his catalogue. Marr was challenged to place five songs in order of greatness, choosing a position for each without knowing which song would follow.
Electronic’s ‘Getting Away With It’ came first, with Marr saying it “goes down very very well, even if people are hearing it for the first time”. Next came ‘Spin’, taken from his latest solo album. Reflecting on the newer song, he admitted that “not everybody knows it, but it makes an impression”.
When ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths came up, Marr observed: “Obviously it’s very well known, but it goes by so quick.” The track remains a “connection” to his younger self, he explained: “I can hear the young man who wrote those guitar parts”. He described his 2014 solo release ‘Easy Money’ as “pretty catchy”, adding that it “goes off bigger than any other at any gig”. He then considered another much loved Smiths song, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’.
“Beautiful song to play. Very proud of it still,” Marr reflected. Recalling a recent performance in Liverpool, he added that “it occurred to me that it’s the ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ of my generation.”
See where each song landed in Marr’s ranking by watching the video below, then share your own order in the Instagram comments.
The wider conversation with NME covered his “emphatic” album ‘The Age Of Everything’, his admiration for The Cure and Fontaines D.C., and his thoughts on why Andy Burnham should be able to listen to The Smiths. Read the complete interview with Marr here.
A Liverpool concert on November 14 is next on Marr’s schedule, followed by a brief run of dates with stops in Mexico, São Paulo and Chile. His largest solo headline performance to date at OVO Arena Wembley had been planned for later this month, but has been postponed, with a replacement date yet to be announced.
Share
Advertisement
