In the final instalment of this series, I’m revisiting an album that I bought on the strength of a mobile phone advert. It might not sound like the most auspicious start, but man, I’m glad I did.

Back in 2001, Vodafone used a song called Bohemian Like You in a TV commercial. I’d never heard of the band, but with its catchy hook, swaggeringly irreverent lyrics and retro, Rolling Stones-esque sound, I liked it enough to buy the single. The B-side boded well (an interesting re-working of AC/DC’s Hells Bells with added trumpets), but even so, I’d have assumed that the album would be par for the course circa 2001: the familiar single release along with one or two other decent tracks, and a whole load of forgettable filler. How wrong I was.

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This week I’m taking a fresh look at Green Day’s American Idiot, an album that many would consider a modern classic. I’m familiar with the big single releases, but don’t recall ever consciously listening to the album all the way through. Will it live up to its status?

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have spent my teenage years listening to Green Day. But, being too young to have caught their mid-90’s heyday, I only really knew them via their hits. Through the prism of singing along to Basket Case at parties, basically. This’ll probably make Green Day fans want to slap me, but I suppose I considered them a fun, quasi-novelty, tongue-in-cheek band – although more reflective hits like Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) hinted at greater depth. Whilst they always had a subversive edge with songs like She, I certainly wouldn’t have expected anything like a protest song from them.

So as a comeback album, American Idiot was unexpected. A ‘punk rock opera’ by a band whose heyday was ten years prior, and had already released a Greatest Hits? Whose last album (2000’s Warning) had failed to make an impact? The term ‘concept album’ was even thrown ominously around. On paper, it kind of sounds like it would be rubbish, or at best, an indulgent late-career project of appeal to hardcore fans only.

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Political turmoil and music have always gone hand in hand. Even in periods of mass apathy, there’s still protest music to be found. In this article I’ll be revisiting an album by US punk rockers Bad Religion, and its part in my political awakening.

The ‘End of History’ early-2000’s was not a great time to be a young person getting interested in politics. I’d listen to my dad’s old Billy Bragg tapes, naively longing for a time when there was something to fight against. In The New Internationalist, I’d read about the human and environmental toll of unfettered globalisation. The problem was, here in the UK, consumer capitalism seemed to be working OK for most people (we’d find out later that it wasn’t, but 2008 was still a long way off). I was, no doubt insufferably, a rebel without a cause.

Then George W Bush and Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq, and Britain saw its biggest mass protest in a generation. Plenty of people my age opposed the war, but frustratingly, I knew few of them. Most of my friends were casually pro-war. Or, they’d internalised the received wisdom of the ‘60s generation: “there’s no point protesting, it doesn’t achieve anything.” Or, worst of all: “It doesn’t affect me, so I don’t care.” They cared about Pop Idol, football or Big Brother, not this.

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In the age of Spotify, the compilation CD might be as redundant as dial-up internet. But for me, they were an essential component of my teenage soundtrack. In this article, I’ll be revisiting an experience shared by so many music fans of my generation: listening to a collection of songs curated by someone else.

Always displayed prominently in HMV, there were lots of compilation albums. If you followed the charts, there were those interminable ‘Now’ albums. But if indie was more your thing, there were compilations like ‘Shine’, ‘The Bands’ or this one – ‘Reloaded’. Why did we buy them? For me, they were a way of discovering new bands without having to splash out on whole albums or buying endless singles.

On getting this CD out, my first thought was: look at some of this stuff! My second thought was: look at some of this stuff. There isn’t space to talk about every single track, but let’s jump in and take a look at the highs and lows of ‘Reloaded’.

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