THE OFFSPRING – live in Oslo
- Posted on 11-10-2025
Full photo gallery:
Text and Photos by Andrea Chirulescu
Olso’s biggest indoor venue located in the city center is getting a facelift nowadays, so all of the big concerts (I believe) are now held at the old Telenor Arena, which is now called Unity Arena and located a tad away from the center and making me dread attending concerts there. Mainly because the logistic skills have always been completely absent and all the safety and security measures for arriving at and leaving the venue were not designed for a smooth process. Sadly, this experience wasn’t any different.
Luckily, the concert itself compensated for that as I got to, once again, watch live some of my favorite MTV heroes – American punk rockers The Offspring – heroes that have recently turned 40. And despite not being a very productive band when it comes to number of albums for the past decades, they have had really big and successful tours that had a duration of several year and covered most continents that allow for a show of such size.
As I was also accepted to photograph the show, we got introduced into the venue by one security member and he guided us through some backstage area and all the way to the mixing board located some good meters away from the stage. We got to photograph the first three songs from there and even if they opened with one of my all times favorites, “Come out and play”, having to keep my balance on the barricade, hold the camera still, try to become tall enough to capture anything above the heads and arms and beers in the air, well, I couldn’t really get into the concert mood until after the fourth song or so (ran off to buy some merch and get some water). But I had enough time to notice the massive backdrop and the fact that they project a lot of visuals on those and it made the whole thing seem massive. Plus they had a normal drumkit on the stage and a second percussion section with tall conga drums, a few toms, and a keyboard and where multi instrumentalist Jonah Nimoy has his base. Besides all the described instruments, he also participates with guitar parts, especially when Dexter only does vocals on certain songs. The band’s new drummer, Brandon Pretzborn, has only been with them since 2023 and seems younger than the band’s age, but he’s doing such an amazing job and he fits perfectly well in the live performance. He even gets a drum solo moment of glory and I believe he did it with the right amount of length and intensity. He was a joy to watch.
Dexter and Noodles are quite unchanged and easily recognisable – one with his nerdy looks (as a proud owner of a PhD diploma and a dude who is serious about his health) and one with the spiky skunk-like hairdo and big round earrings, while big black frame glasses still decorate his face. They do quite a big amount of talking as well and there’s a lot of back and forth at some point when Noodles tries to impress us by telling there’s a world record just established by the one million, few hundred thousands people in the audience tonight. Whose numbers kept going up and down when people left or started giving birth. He was also kind enough to introduce everyone in the band and deliver a cool guitar redention of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”.
Being songs that I have listened to for tens of thousands of times by now, I was really happy and nicely impressed that Dexter’s voice managed to deliver them in a very close to original fashion and that they kept them punk and not try to be too inventive with song arrangements. Nothing wrong with that, but it got nostalgia points. What the band did go wild with and made it very modern were the stage props. After the third song there were two huge skeletons (top halves) on each side of the stage and they’d breathe out smoke for a couple of songs. Later on the band even covered some Ozzy songs as tribute and they also performed ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’. The venue got covered in gianormous balloons during ‘Why Don’t you Get a Job” and then the stage got filled by three or four air filled figurines (like the ones you’d sometimes see on the side of the road, “waving” their arms in the wind and inviting you at the nearby business) for “Pretty Fly”. The figurines resembled the guy from the video, with cap and big chains around his neck. I even spotted some people in the audience actually dressed like the ‘fly guy’. Fun. Oh and the amount of sing along, I was actually impressed by how many young people seemed to know the songs and scream the lyrics, including the ones for “The Kids Aren’t Alright”. Which got a new meaning in my head, all of a sudden, now that many years have passed by and the song is no longer about what happens to others, far away from me.
I knew there’d be an encore after this song but I couldn’t risk the pleasant company of tons of drunk people in public transport, so I walked to the bus stop as soon as this song ended. I’m super glad I got to attend the show and that it was so well delivered and performed. Congrats to the band and their crew for the quality show and thanks for the time travel! Wish they’d get the piano on stage like in other cities and perform “Gone Away”, but maybe next time.