1994. I bought Dookie by Green Day. I was 14 and having the first thoughts that everything wasn’t as tickety boo in life as I had always thought. For the first time I was questioning the money obsession, looks are everything, success is being a footballer bullshit I had bought into my whole life. By questioning, I mean I was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable in myself. So when I heard the opening line ‘I’m not growing up, I’m just burning out and I stepped in line to walk amongst the dead,’ I felt a pang of comfort. There was a connection between me and the music. Not one that I made known to anyone of course, because I wasn’t a crusty or anything. I was Dave. Dave the footballer. Dave of the mainstream. Not one of them smelly people. I lay in the bath after another football match and I was feeling sad. Depressed almost. But what did I have to be depressed about? In five years time I would be fucking loads of birds whilst earning 100 grand a week and playing for England.

’I’m taking all you down with me, explosive duct taped to my spine, nothings gonna change my mind’. Something about these songs was in me though. Was me. My self loathing grew as did my hatred of everything I had believed in.

It might be an album that lots of teenagers identify with but it is one that should have meant nothing to me. Songs about teenage angst are not for the top boys, the dogs bollocks of the male species. But they were for me. Perhaps I was not going to be a famous footballer after all.

‘seventeen and strung out on confusion, trapped inside a world of disillusion, I’ve found out what it takes to be a man, mum and dad would never understand, what’s happening to me.’

You can change the seventeen to any number in that song. I did and continue to. Somehow I cast off the shackles of the bullshit I had grown up with but the smell still lingers on. Green Day have gone the other way, they started on the outside but now they are doing songs with fucking U2!

14 years later I am one of them smelly people.

‘Let’s nuke the bridge we torched 2000 times before.’

Dave Hemmings is 26 and works in a books and music shop in Brighton. To read a selection of poems by David on the showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2009 Laura Hird All rights reserved.