Green Day FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the World’s Most Popular Punk Band
Hank Bordowitz
(Backbeat Books, £15.99)

IT’S somewhat audacious to claim that Green Day inspired “nearly as many bands to pick up instruments as Elvis, The Beatles and the Ramones.” Yet that unsubstantiated assertion is one of many hyperbolic flights in Hank Bordowitz’s book.

The journalist, who’s written for the likes of Playboy and Huffington Post, is an unashamed fan-boy of the punk-pop band. Lauding their working-class roots and their lyrical transition “from pot and poop to politics,” he covers everything you wanted to know about the trio and more besides.

The snag to his fandom is its tendency to lack perspective or critical capacity. Although well researched — there's a 16-page bibliography — there’s no attempt at analysis and, with no fresh interviews with the band or their associates, the book is reduced to something of a cut-and-paste enterprise.

It’s a potential problem for a work squarely aimed at dedicated fans rather than those with a passing interest in the band and the dearth of new material or analysis, and the fact that all its material is already in the public domain means it lacks a compelling selling point.

That isn’t to say it’s completely devoid of merits. Presented thematically rather than chronologically, with chapters on everything from the members’ various tattoos to their favoured makes of instrument, individual chapters can be dipped into for information, a structure that means it’s not overly important that some data is repeated across the book as a whole.

But some information could be made easier to digest. Lists of chart figures are in the main body of the text when tables would have been clearer and other sections, such as the chapter dedicated to artists influenced by Green Day, are little more than bullet points.

These may be minor considerations but more significant is that some of the fact-checking is faulty, as is the proofing. Live 8 marked the 20th anniversary of Live Aid not the 10th as claimed in a chapter about the band’s humanitarian work, there are references to English rather than UK chart positions and the definite article in names such as The Beatles is not always capitalised.

This carelessness lets down Bordowitz’s own research and his evident love of the band and fans would be prudent to wait for a more definitive publication on Green Day.