Source: Promo Image
Last year, Good Charlotte caught us all by surprise with their unexpected return from hiatus with the comeback single ‘Makeshift Love’. Then they announced they’ll be back in the UK supporting fellow Maryland pop-punkers All Time Low on their arena tour. First of all, I was so excited to think that after 5 years, I’d be able to see such an influential band in my life, after finally coming to terms with the possibility of never being able to do so again.
However, I was also a little gutted that such a special moment as Good Charlotte’s return was going to be clouded over by the fact that All Time Low were playing some massive headline shows. No disrespect to All Time Low, but after patiently waiting for so long, this wasn’t really news that made you jump for joy.
Nonetheless, Good Charlotte had been away for so many years, and there’s now practically an entirely new generation of music fans who probably have no clue who they are. So when weighing the options of playing a tiny headline show in a dingy bar, or playing in a venue as massive as the O2 Arena in London with the potential of multiplying the fanbase; from the band’s standpoint the choice was quite clear.
It was evident judging by the number of hands that shot up when frontman Joel Madden asked who was seeing the band for the first time, that the band would definitely benefit from this exposure. It also helps that above anything else; Joel and his brother Benji have always been and still are entertainers.
You would never classify Good Charlotte as the most talented musicians in the game, but that really doesn’t matter when at the end of the day it’s difficult to not enjoy yourself anyway. Who cares if there are guitar solos, drum solos thrown in left and right if you don’t leave the show feeling like it was a great night? This is what these guys can promise you if you head down to a gig.
Seeing as there were quite a few people in the crowd who evidently only came to the show to watch Good Charlotte’s set, we were lucky about a) the length of the set – at 11 songs long we got a good hour of entertainment b) a large portion of the setlist was dedicated The Young And The Hopeless. The band started their set with a video montage accompanied by the album’s intro ‘A New Beginning’; and this is quite unusual, taking an intro from an album released almost 14 years ago, but it was obvious that we were about to experience one hell of a nostalgic trip.
“We’re going to take it back to an old-school pop-punk Good Charlotte show. What I want to do at the O2 tonight is take this back to 2002/2003 and I want this to be the biggest pop-punk mosh pit that O2 Arena has ever seen,” Joel said before the final track and the Waldorf quintet’s first hit ‘Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous’. That’s exactly what this show felt like. For a moment we got to forget it’s actually 2016 and pretend that we were all angsty teens back in the early 00s. With most bands opting to play newer material, this was a lovely tribute to the fans who had stuck around with the band for so long.
Good Charlotte are reportedly releasing their sixth studio album this summer and making a return to the UK in autumn. If you didn’t get the chance to see them on this tour, be sure to head down to a show when they’re back here because even after such a long time off, the pop-punk titans are still on top form.
