The grand old lady of Dame Street has probably never seen anything like this before. While a collection of pierced and tattooed types look down from the gilded boxes, the mosh pit and attending crowd surfing has already started a good ten minutes before Rancid come on stage.
Yet maybe this isn’t all that unfamiliar. Alongside the ubiquitous skater fraternity are to be found a more hardcore and, crucially, older punk audience who wouldn’t be seen dead at a Sum 41, Blink 182 or Green Day show. Perhaps, like the late Joe Strummer, they see something of the true spirit of ’77 in these four Californians.
Whatever, it’s a volatile mix that boils over the minute the opening bars of ‘Ruby Soho’ explode into life. What follows is a frustratingly mixed bag. The sound is pretty poor, rendering the succession of frantic punk rockers an increasingly indecipherable mess. On the other hand, what makes Rancid so thrilling is that, like their obvious mentors The Clash, they realise that there is more to the world than that which exists in their own little punk backyard. There are blasts of ska, reggae, dancehall, skinhead rap, even a cover of Billy Bragg’s ‘To Have And Have Not’ and a handful of tunes so memorable that you begin to wonder why they’re not rubbing shoulders with the commercial elite.
Duff sound and all, the whole experience is, at times, almost unbearably exciting and leaves you with just a hint of what those heady days may have been like.