Footnotes:
    [1] Aborted due to time constraints

Show Notes: NME (08/25/2012): Green Day brought Reading Festival to a standstill today (August 25) as they played a surprise set on the NME/Radio 1 Stage.

The band had been rumoured to perform at 12pm and were thought to be playing their 1994 album ‘Dookie’ from start to finish. However, their set actually began at 11am and was only confirmed when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong took to Twitter to say so, writing: “Green day – READING FESTIVAL CONFIRMED!! On stage in 45 minutes! In the NME / RADIO 1 tent. 11am!! Be there!”

Such was the demand to get in that the organisers were forced to seal off access to the stage, leaving most of the crowd to watch the band on the Main Stage, where the set was being shown on a big screen.

At numerous times during the set, Armstrong heightened the atmosphere by pretending to be dragged off-stage by organisers. After curtailing the band’s 2004 single ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’, he told the crowd: “We’re having a little fucking problem with time.”

Yet even when the coverage ended on the Main Stage, the band still ploughed on, leaving a large group of fans to watch a distant screen from behind a security cordon. In the end, the set clocked in at just over an hour and included 14 songs, with classics ‘Basket Case’, ‘Minority’ and ‘Brain Stew’ all in the setlist. They ended with ‘Dookie’ track ‘She’.

During the set, Armstrong praised the Reading crowd, telling them that he rated them more highly than US audiences. He said after the crowd’s rabid response to ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’: “That’s why I fucking love England, the Americans just don’t get that shit.”