Green Day on the “bummer” of their pre-‘American Idiot’ album ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ being stolen 

Green Day have reflected on the “bummer” of their pre-‘American Idiot’ album ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ being stolen more than 20 years ago, while also noting that it was a “blessing” in disguise.

The unreleased record was written and recorded in 2003, but the master tapes were stolen when it was close to being finished.

Instead of being the follow-up to 2000’s ‘Warning’, they released their seminal ‘American Idiot’ in 2004.

“They were just gone,” said Tré Cool of the ‘Cigarettes And Valentines’ recordings in a new interview with Audacy, “so somebody probably stole them – maybe didn’t know what was on them”.

“I’ve never heard that ever happening to anybody,” added frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. “It was a bummer, for sure. We put a lot of work into it, but at the same time, it was a blessing. We were like, ‘Let’s just start from scratch. Let’s try this over again.’ Maybe it’s just a sign that maybe we made a crappy record and we should make a better one.”

Asked whether anything from the lost record made it onto any later Green Day material, Armstrong added: “There was a lot of stuff that were full songs, from the original version of ‘Homecoming’, that was on American Idiot. We ended up using a lot of those parts, and of connected it together, which makes this sort of crazy suite, as they call it, of a song.”

The band spoke to NME back in 2016 about the lost ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ .

Explaining that mixes of the tracks were recovered and the title track was recorded and released for live album ‘Awesome As Fuck’. Armstrong added: “We’ll see if any of that stuff ends up seeing the light of day.”

Bassist Mike Dirnt added: “There’s always a lot in the vault, but we tend to look forward rather than reaching back.

Armstrong also mentioned one song from then-new album ‘Revolution Radio‘, called ‘Youngblood’, that was written a long time ago and “got a facelift and new lyrics and stuff like that”.

In more recent news from the pop-punk rockers, Green day are currently outselling the rest of the UK albums chart’s top 10 combined with ‘Saviors’.

In a four-star review, NME said the record was “their best work since ‘American Idiot’”, which “finds them wiser, more subtle, but still up for a romp”.