The Offspring, The O2 Arena – November 14th 2025

It’s time to relax. You know what that means: a ten-pound pint of beer, your corporate-venue plastic chair, and of course, the ‘Best of Pop Punk’ playlist streaming on massive PA speakers. So go on and indulge yourself! That’s right: tuck in your shoes to let the crowd pass. Then stand up and try to recall the melodies. After all, music soothes even the savage beast…

In case it’s not clear, I’m cheekily rewriting the introduction to The Offspring’s classic 1994 album Smash to fit the O2 arena vibe tonight. It’s an intro burned deeply into my brain given its importance as one of my formative introductions to guitar music, first hearing it around age twelve. I’m sure that’s the case for most of the crowd tonight, a wonderfully motley gathering consisting largely of older millennials such as myself.

Queuing to pass through the O2 Priority Gate tonight, I feel like I’ve walked into a Philip K. Dick novel as a calm, modulated voice informs us that we’re being monitored by AI-assisted crowd security, while many fans outside take pictures of The Offspring’s tour poster in which the band emerges from the River Thames, towering over London Bridge like a five-way Godzilla, smoothed into life by ChatGPT.

The venue is reassuringly full of humanity, however, as around 20,000 people gradually take their positions around the vast arena, responding with gusto to the various warm-up antics arranged for tonight’s gig. Later, Offspring’s larger-than-life guitarist Noodles will “call HQ” on his headset for a quote on the “record-breaking attendance” for this sold-out show, somehow producing a figure in excess of two million. And it’s typical of the wholesome, family-friendly banter that he and main man Dexter indulge in tonight.

Kicking off in that spirit, for some reason the crowd is asking: Where’s Wally? (Waldo?) Well, he’s out in the thick of it, raised onto shoulders, warming the crowd up – keeping us all singing along as ‘All the Small Things’ is blasted from the PA.

Further possibly dystopian details include a white robot skulking in the shadows by the stage, gliding gently back and forth with an eerie smoothness, seemingly monitoring the crowd for misbehavior. It seems like some of the most advanced and terrifying security I’ve seen at a show—until it’s revealed as another original prank from The Offspring: a slogan-bearing blimp which is soon floating above the crowd, videoing us for the big screen. People get overexcited about their few seconds of fame, of course, wave to their mums (moms) and do lots of frantic waving, or pretend to ignore it, playing it cool.

Canadian pop-rockers Simple Plan explode onto the stage full of the naive optimism and insatiable energy of youth; well, full of a similar sense of youth to that with which they first wrote these songs decades ago anyhow. None of the four members seems to stand still for more than a few seconds, as they smash out song after song of euphorically catchy, exuberantly upbeat hits – hits you realize you do know even if you’d struggled to recall who Simple Plan were when you checked tonight’s support.

For once, the O2 support band doesn’t feel like a support band; Simple Plan are loud, with a full set, providing the opportunity to make the most of the full production value on offer and to pull out all the stops and tricks for the arena. So there are coordinated clap-alongs, call-and-responses, jump-arounds, plumes of smoke, hold your phone-lights in the air like fireflies, showers of confetti, and even a full pack of Scoobies running around the stage for – you guessed it – ‘What’s New, Scooby-Doo?’. Drummer Chuck and singer Pierre switch roles at one stage, keeping the energy fresh, and the set is nicely balanced with fast-punk, mid-tempo pop, and cheesy yet endearing ballads.

While I can’t see myself running to their merch stand after the show, Simple Plan’s show is perfectly executed and delivered with such a joyous, rapturous sense of fun and playfulness that it’s impossible not to get sucked in.

So we need no incentive to ‘Come Out and Play’ by the time The Offspring launch into that hit song. Dexter and Noodles do plenty of talking tonight, but save it for later, continuing an opening trio of early classics with ‘All I Want’ and ‘Want You Bad.’ Safe to say that we all know exactly what Dexter Holland wants – which, right now, seems genuinely to be to enjoy himself.

The whole band are all looking great and sounding strong tonight; not bad for a bunch of guys pushing sixty years old. Noodles is every bit the character you might expect, with his black-and-white thick-striped suit and spiky black/grey/blonde hair. Dexter looks very healthy, addressing the crowd with a directness, and friendliness, and celebrating the handsomeness of their second guitarist. If their stage banter is highly performative and well-rehearsed, there seems to be a genuine affection between Dexter and Noodles after all these years, which is quite touching.

The stage design very much reflects their latest album Supercharged with its giant inflatable blue/white skeletons, charged with electricity, which in turn reflects both the Smash album cover and (perhaps inadvertently) that of Metallica’s classic Ride the Lightning. And on the video screens, psychedelic cartoons narrate surreal stories synced to the songs, segueing into familiar album covers and music video snippets.

I get everything I’d hoped for tonight, including a venue united in shouting some life-affirming “cuss words” during ‘Bad Habit’, some ridiculously jaunty dancing to ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’, dredging up some lingering teenage angst for my karaoke version of ‘Self Esteem’, and of course a totally ridiculous, all-out party for ‘Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)’.

“You’re all pretty fly!” quips Dexter, and – for three minutes and eight seconds – maybe we are.

We also get plenty of things I couldn’t have predicted. A white grand piano is wheeled out for a surprisingly moving version of ‘Gone Away’, which Dexter dedicates to someone he lost recently: stripped back to the basics of melody and harmony (makes you realize how good a songwriter he is), before the band kicks in for the full-speed finale. There are several covers, both played in full and teased. Noodles teases Sabbath’s ‘Electric Funeral’ (“I never learn full songs! Blame the ADHD”), before they smash through most of ‘Paranoid’. But it’s a perfect, full version of Ozzy’s ‘Crazy Train’ that gets the biggest applause, with Todd Morse nailing every note of Randy Rhoads’s iconic solo. I do an inner eye roll when Dexter starts playing ‘Hey Jude’ (Why is it always that Beatles song?) but they do it so well that I can’t help but sing along too.

Tonight makes it clear that The Offspring have aged much better than most of their pop-punk contemporaries. Blink-182’s schoolboy humour sounds cringe coming from the mouths of grown men despite their excellent drummer. Green Day stepped up, turning their sound towards “serious” political songwriting but seem to have trailed off. Sum 41 are… I honestly don’t know. But Dexter and co. always had the raw energy and the songwriting chops to produce classic material, and this massive show leaves no one doubting that this has not diminished with age.

“This might be the best gathering of human beings ever,” Noodles enthuses towards the end. I’m not sure I can go quite that far, but this was indeed a vibrant – and wonderfully human – gathering: the perfect antidote to the small notes of corporate dystopia and AI-induced anxiety that I’ve allowed to creep into my evening. It has certainly been the most amount of sheer fun I’ve had at a gig for a long time.