Green Day blast through Insomniac lead single Geek Stink Breath on Saturday Night Live.
Green Day have been keeping their time machine in fine working order of late to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Insomniac, having now just shared a video of lead single Geek Stink Breath being performed on Saturday Night Live back in 1994.
The Oakland titans have been continuing to throw things back to the ’90s for the past couple of weeks, unveiling never-before-seen footage from the Insomniac Tour, an MTV performance of Brain Stew/Jaded, and 86 being played Live On Letterman in 1995. Now, they've posted a video of their first-ever performance on SNL in 1994, before Insomniac was released officially in October 1995.
Read this: Green Day: The inside story of Insomniac
Reflecting on the success of Dookie and being thrust into the spotlight ahead of the release of Insomniac, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told Kerrang! this year, “It was completely uncomfortable. I was completely out of my comfort zone, because it was all chaos. It was like every day this thing was getting bigger and bigger. It was really exciting, but it was also really stressful, because you suddenly go from doing everything yourselves and sleeping on floors, and then suddenly it was like everybody was in a frenzy to get to me, Mike [Dirnt, bass] and Tré [Cool, drums]. It was just nuts – it was a crazy time.”
The vocalist/guitarist also detailed that time period in an interview with pop megastar Billie Eilish last year, explaining how the stress of it all fed into Insomniac in a big way.
“I was sort of lost at sea,” he said. “There’s extreme highs, and you’re playing to a new audience really excited to hear you. But I think what was really important to me was being real. I think I worried about that too much, the part where you’re thinking, ‘I need to stay rooted at all costs.’ Sometimes I would get very hardheaded about that. And the record after that, Insomniac, was a really dark record. I was pretty numb to everything.”
Watch Green Day on SNL below:
Read this: The 20 greatest Green Day songs – ranked
