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

The band previously told NME that “we'll see if any of that stuff sees the light of day”

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.

• READ MORE: Green Day reveal the fate of ‘lost’ pre-‘American Idiot’ album ‘Cigarettes And Valentines’

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”.