It's likely nobody will look back on 2016 with much fondness. Everyone knows what happened by now – celebrities dropped like Jonestown members after necking the Kool Aid and western politics was taken over by radical populism at a rate not seen since the 1930s while, in the strangest turn of events, Leicester City won the Premier League. It was also the year that, as if their logo had been projected into the sky in a time of crisis, Green Day emerged and released their latest album, Revolution Radio, and started playing shows again.

Ok, it wasn't quite enough to undo all of the unpleasantness that surrounded it this year, but it took the edge off. Like musical ointment on the bee sting of international politics, pop punk soothed us.

While most retrospectives of the year will take a global view of world events and how they affected all of us, for my own sanity I have decided to approach it with a personal, some might say insular, attitude. Green Day aren't going have any great impact on things like the Syrian civil war so it makes sense to keep it close to home. I've dug through the GDA archive and summarised the headlines of the year.

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