At just 16 years of age, Good Charlotte played their first show to “15 other kids”. Thirty years later and they’re going stronger than ever. Benji Madden tells the band’s story through 10 pivotal gigs…
From high school parties to headlining Slam Dunk, via busking and opening for Justin Timberlake, Good Charlotte have played anywhere and everywhere. Benji Madden looks back on their journey and recalls the shows that made them…
“Our first-ever show was a high school party of a kid named Phil Miller. He had a band and we convinced him to let us play. There were maybe 15 other kids there. I still have the setlist to this day! I have it framed at home. We played five songs, all originals – we weren’t good enough to play covers. I’d have to do a bit of a deep-dive to see if we ended up taking any part of those songs to use on our debut album. Joel [Madden, vocals] was so nervous that he didn’t face the audience, but we were 16 years old and just so excited to be able to play, and make some noises, and it sound like music. We were great! You know, if I saw a bunch of kids that age doing that now, I’d think it was so awesome.”
“Back in the ’90s there were some hugely influential alt.rock radio stations, including WHFS in Washington, D.C. For a number of years they put on a festival called HFStival, which was one of my earliest exposures to all these great bands. We ended up playing on its main stage after our first album came out. Festival Song was sort of born from that festival, and we ended up shooting the music video for it there, with Marc Webb who would go on to direct The Amazing Spider-Man and a bunch of really cool movies. But before then, in 1999 they let us play in the parking lot. I think that was our first real break.”
“That time around 1999 and into 2000 was so head-spinning for us, but we were also incredibly focused. We were desperate to get signed to a label. We were going from one job to the next, trying to keep our commitments, support our family. But we were also just young guys going out into the world for the first time. We didn’t have much life experience; our upbringing was sheltered, very strict. Our mom was terrified of the world, and we didn’t have anything, so we never travelled outside of where we grew up in the sticks. One of the first times we went to New York City, Joel and I were sort of between places to live and we’d bought this car for $1,500, borrowing the money from a bartender from the bar I worked at, because we needed some way of getting to all these opportunities we were getting. We drove to play this show in the back of some restaurant or something. Everything we owned was in that car… and it got stolen. We were sat on the street trying not to cry. We busked that night to earn enough money for somewhere to sleep and to get home the next day. It was a crazy, crazy time, but it gives you wisdom, and humility.”
“In the best and silliest ways imaginable, Warped Tour was like going to high school again. You’re the freshmen, so you’re going to get picked on. Then there’s some older kids who are gonna put their arm around you and teach you some stuff. Being a part of Warped for the first time was super-exciting, but it also made us grow up a lot in a way, too. It made us question, ‘Is Warped Tour where we want to stay? Is this little town where you want to stay?’ I’m saying this in a romantic way – not negative at all. But we knew that wasn’t where we wanted to be. We wanted to see the world. We cherished every minute on every Warped Tour, but we didn’t want to be held to making records for that world. It was like home, in that you knew you could always go back. We’ve kept a really tight, loving relationship with that community, and that first Warped Tour made us some lifelong friends. You see people now from that time and it’s like going back to your high school reunion – which is sweet for us, because we never did go back to our actual reunions.”
“Our first time playing overseas was actually in Australia and New Zealand. Little Things had become a big hit on the radio, so we went over to play shows and do these mainstream TV appearances. Things really took off over there on our first record. We didn’t even have passports – we had to get them for the first time just for that trip. We couldn’t believe what was happening to us. When you’re kids from rural Maryland, going to another country always sounded so exotic. We had such a ball over there, and we’ve had an amazing relationship with Australia ever since. We knew then we were making it.”
“We were on tour, playing in arenas opening for No Doubt when The Young And The Hopeless came out. I think we were somewhere like Minneapolis the week the record came out, and I will always remember standing in a parking lot when David Massey from our label Epic called to tell us how many records we had sold that week. It was such a surreal situation. We were so excited at that time, but we also didn’t want to fail. We didn’t want to blow the chance we’d gotten. That was really deeply seared into our psyche. The poverty, the self-esteem, everything we went through as young men. You find music through pain and the need for an outlet, so that was a big driver for us. We wanted it, y’know? It was amazing to reach those levels but also a lot to take in. ‘What does this all mean? What does it mean to have a song that everyone knows? Am I special now? Am I a valuable person? Am I no longer the worthless, white trash kid?’ I think that’s the position a lot of musicians come from: ‘Please, someone believe in me.’ And I see it now in bands who get there and still don’t feel content. The music can soothe you, but it can never fix you. That’s got to come from some place else. We probably came close to going off the rails lots of times, but Joel and I have always had each other to lean on.”
“We had become friendly with Justin over the years, but the decision to open those shows was very intentional. I always wanted to push the boundaries. We had experimented on our album The Chronicles Of Life And Death [2004], and going into making the next record, Good Morning Revival [2007], we felt that people wanted us to make another The Young And The Hopeless. But we wanted something different again. We wanted to buck against this thing, to challenge people. We were interested in moving forwards, and to us that tour pushed the boundaries. It pushed the boundaries of what people would think, and what was allowed back then. We went out and did stadiums in Europe with P!nk, too. We’ve always said we don’t exactly fit in the Warped crowd, and don’t exactly fit in the mainstream, and we are very comfortable with that. Now it feels like the world has caught up with us, and that’s a beautiful thing to see. Kids don’t think in genres – imagine telling them now that they can’t do something [like this]. ‘What are you saying, old man?’”
“When we released Cardiology [2010], there was a lot of turmoil in the band, and a lot of frustration for some people. We’d stumbled through this whole thing and never truly worked out our dynamic and our roles in the band, and I guess Joel and I had never asserted ourselves in the right way. The only way we could work it out was to just stop. I never saw [the 2011 hiatus] as us breaking up, because you can’t break us up. Joel and I went and made the Madden Brothers record – which really should have just been a GC record, but we didn’t have the maturity to have those conversations yet. By the time we got to 2015 we spent some time together and it was nice, and we got to talking about our frustrations and how we communicated as a band. So we decided to start doing a few things, I didn’t want it to be this huge deal, so we booked a small show at the Troubadour to start. It was really special, and to this day one of my favourite ever shows – the vibe, the sing-alongs, the friends who showed up. I think that Troubadour show was the beginning of us working out how to be in Good Charlotte as adults, and not a bunch of kids.”
“We’ve always felt very comfortable and very understood in the UK. It’s a very easy, very special relationship where we can just be ourselves. We don’t have to pretend anything; we can just roll. I guess we’ve always been predisposed to the UK because so much of our favourite music is from there. Headlining Slam Dunk in 2018 was the first time we’d ever played at the festival just because, you know, we had spent all the years before going off and challenging people’s expectations. By the time we got there, it just felt right. We’ve had so many amazing shows in the UK over the years, and Slam Dunk really was a classic – it was unreal. It’s such an important festival for the UK and for the culture. It’s a bridge between all of these different scenes and a place for the next generation of bands to come up. I always look at it as being what Warped Tour was. It really is the breeding ground for all of this. We can’t wait to celebrate the 20th anniversary there [in 2026].”
“It’s crazy to grow up and become husbands and fathers and to see kids in your family grow up. We’ve known Sofia [younger sister of Joel’s wife, Nicole] since she was, like, six or seven years old. Joel called one day and said, ‘Hey, Sofia wants us to play their wedding after-party – are you in?’ And it was the easiest ‘yes’ from everyone. We hadn’t played live together in maybe four years by that point, but we all jumped on a plane to France and played five or six songs in this little basement at the Hotel Du Cap, which is just so fancy you could never begin to imagine. It was so sweet, so much fun, so human and so full of love; it was like being back in Phil Miller’s basement again, playing only for people you knew. After we played, the wedding’s winding down and we’re sitting having a few drinks, and the talk turns to people telling us we need to do another record. Literally the next day Joel and I are getting coffee and he goes, ‘I think we really should do another record, you know…’ It took a moment like that show for us to really emotionally reconnect with Good Charlotte and ask ourselves if we still had something to say, or songs still to write. And little by little, we started to find those things again.”
Good Charlotte will play Slam Dunk Festival at Hatfield Park on May 23 and Leeds Temple Newsam on May 24 – get your tickets now. This interview originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of Kerrang!.
Read this next:
