Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong is happy to pose for pictures with fans, but if you're not a fan, please don't bother. He recently told Kerrang!, “Sometimes it’s great – when I’m able to communicate with fans and people are cool, and when people get something out of the music and you make these connections, but I think the thing that makes it uncomfortable is how f***ed-up social media has become, and how everyone’s got a camera in their pocket now. There are a lot of people out there who aren’t fans who just wanna be guilty by association or something. They wanna hold you in their pocket as a souvenir. And I think that sometimes that’s the part that gets annoying.”
He adds that he can “always tell” a genuine fan from someone who is pretending to be one.
Armstrong also touched on the mental health issues he has dealt with over the years and how the music scene was his form of medicine. He explained, “The punk rock scene, for me, was a scene of all these people with personality disorders coming together a lot of the time. And I didn’t really realise that until later on. If you’re into punk and hard rock, it kinda mellows people out. In a way, it’s the antidote for really troubled people . . .”
