The Offspring returned to Montreal on August 5 for a sold-out night at MTELUS, bringing their Only the Punk Stuff tour to a considerably smaller room than the stadiums and festivals they regularly headline.
Tickets reportedly disappeared within five minutes, which gives some indication of the demand surrounding the show. The tour offered something different from a conventional greatest-hits set, focusing on the Southern California band’s earlier punk material and bringing several rarely performed songs back into circulation.
Local bands General Chaos and Thick Glasses opened the evening, introducing two generations of Montreal punk to a crowd that stretched from the floor to the balcony. By the time the headliners arrived, there was no barricade separating the stage from the audience, helping create an atmosphere closer to an old punk club than a typical large-scale Offspring concert.
The band opened with Session and We Are One, immediately establishing the direction of the set. Rather than leaning heavily on the radio singles that turned them into international stars, they reached further back into their catalogue, including seven songs from Ignition and material from their 1989 self-titled debut.
Among the deeper cuts were Crossroads, A Thousand Days and Beheaded, while Nothing from Something returned to the set after several years away. The band also performed Breaking These Bones from Let the Bad Times Roll, balancing those early songs with occasional glimpses of their more recent work.
With no photo pit or front barrier, the boundary between the crowd and stage quickly disappeared. Fans crowd-surfed towards the front, climbed onto the stage and launched themselves back into the room as the pit expanded across the floor. It gave the show a loose and unpredictable quality rarely possible when a band reaches venues of this size.
The 24-song set eventually moved towards more familiar territory. Following Pay the Man, the closing stretch included All I Want and Staring at the Sun, before The Kids Aren’t Alright brought the night to an end.
After more than three decades, The Offspring could comfortably build an entire show around their biggest singles. In Montreal, they chose instead to revisit the songs that established the band long before Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) made them household names. For longtime fans, it was an opportunity to hear material that has rarely appeared onstage in recent years. For everyone else, it was a reminder that beneath the humour, hooks and MTV-era success, The Offspring began as a punk band.
Ryan Rumpel was there to photograph the show for Montreal Rocks. Check out the gallery below.
