The Offspring
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
On the evidence of kiss cams, beach balls, a gorilla-suited hype man and a sizeable drone-powered blimp, you couldn’t accuse The Offspring of going through the motions at 3Arena.
Three decades have passed since the band’s magnum opus, Smash, said to be the bestselling album ever released on an independent record label. Frontman Dexter Holland and guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman are the onstage remains of that era, with the former now looking like a better-haired Biff Tannen, from Back to the Future Part II.
Some of The Offspring’s success was shrapnel from Nirvana’s early-1990s explosion of underground music in the US. Succeeding grunge, they were pivotal alongside the likes of Green Day and Bad Religion in hijacking the mainstream and prefixing punk with pop.
As with the names Dexter and Noodles, some may call the sound anachronistic now. This is American punk rock of days gone by. None of your leather coats or progressive politics. The Offspring are three chords and a bleached, snotty version of the truth. Or, at least, that is the face of it.
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Theatrics abound at 3Arena on Wednesday night. A Super Bowl-style intermission follows the opening act, Simple Plan, and lasts about half an hour. During that time we’re introduced to the gorilla, who fires T-shirts into the audience as the kiss cam alternates between celebrity lookalikes and punters giving the finger.
Depth is there for those who look for it. The Offspring open with Come Out and Play – track seven from Smash – a song about school and gang violence with a hook inspired by Holland’s experience working in a biology laboratory: to cool hot flasks of steaming liquid, “you gotta keep ’em separated”.
The blurred lines between serious and unserious are epitomised by Holland’s achievements away from the band. As Noodles informs us, in recent years his costar completed a PhD in molecular biology while also founding his own hot-sauce company, Gringo Bandito.
Seven songs in, a pair of gigantic skeletons are inflated on either side of the stage. They match the tour’s neon-blue, plasma-globe theme. By this stage, bobbing topless pits have long formed in the body of the crowd.
A sort-of-bizarre, sort-of-brilliant middle section punctures the set. Noodles pays tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, playing snippets of Paranoid and Crazy Train, before leading a punk-rock arrangement of Grieg’s classical piece In the Hall of the Mountain King, from Peer Gynt. The deck is eventually cleared for Brandon Pertzborn, the band’s drummer, to launch into a beguiling extended solo while his bandmates catch a breath.
Holland is first to return, alongside a grand piano, for a sombre version of their 1997 song Gone Away. Somehow that leads into Hey Jude as the mosh pits are forced to temporarily adapt to a singalong. They oblige before the arrival of the final string of hits.
Pretty Fly (For a White Guy), The Kids Aren’t Alright, Self Esteem and You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid bring the night to its zenith. Noodles and Holland carry the crowd with them, legs planted in isosceles power stances and faces beaming. The Offspring may be a period piece, but they remain a beloved one.
