Darkness at 3AM: Billie Joe shows his pants

There's been a lot of stories amongst travellers recently of airlines suddenly imposing dress codes on top of the extra fees and crammed misery they already inflict on their passengers.

And now, suddenly, the fight against low-slung pants on tightly-loaded planes has pulled in a famous name.

Well, semi-famous. The 3AM Girls report Billie Joe-Armstrong has been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight after refusing to pull his trousers up:

An ABC7 news producer who was on the same flight told the station that a flight attendant approached Armstrong as the plane was getting ready to take off and asked him to hike his trousers higher. The producer, Cindy Qiu, says Armstrong initially responded by asking the attendant if there weren't "better things to do than worry about that?"

But the attendant persisted and told Armstrong he could be ejected for his refusal to comply. When Armstrong insisted he was just trying to get to his seat, he and a travelling companion were taken off the plane.

I'm assuming that the Southwest staff had merely been suspicious why a thirty nine year-old man was dressed up like a fifteen year-old. Who wouldn't be?

Billie Joe attempts to hold back tide

Billie Joe Armstrong has, rather sweetly, tried to stop people filming Pinhead Gunpowder gigs and putting them on YouTube. Well, it doesn't hurt to ask, does it?:

"YouTube can't own everything. There's also something called memories."

We're not sure that it actually wipes memories out of people's brains if things appear on YouTube - does it work like that?

We know, of course, that Billie Joe begged for fans to put their cameras away, thanks to the large number of people who filmed him saying this.

Billie Joe reveals 'real' and 'stagnant' are antonyms

Poor old Green Day - having wrought a world in which every band is a bit like them (by making being a bit like Blink 182 seem, sort of, cool), they're now struggling to find isnpiration for their next record:

“We have a lot of music – something like 45 songs. It’s total chaos, I want to dig into who I am and what I’m feeling at this moment – which is middle aged.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years now. You want to make sure you’re being honest with yourself. I also have to ask myself ‘what’s real out there?’ Right now, it seems stagnant.”

We're not sure that stagnancy and unreality are the same thing, and we're a little lost as to why a stagnant music scene would suddenly make recording music difficult - isn't it better to have something to react against.

How, we wonder, does Armstrong check that the songs he's writing are being honest with him? Does he hire a detective to go through their bins, checking for unexplained restaurant receipts or discarded gifts? Or does he use a lie detector test of some sort?

Fall Out Boy: There really is no rush

The soothing balm contained in the news that Fall Out Ball have written a load of new songs is that they want to wait until they do anything with them, says Patrick Stump:

"I've got a bunch of songs written, but I think I'm going to wait a while before we release it, because I'm still really proud of this record and I want to kind of give it some space."

Presumably, he'll wait until the pride in the current album turns to shame, which could take quite a long time. After all, for most people, the cloying sense of shameful dullness would have started to kick in at the first playback of the record, and since Stump managed to get through apparently unaware that he's produced a record with all the charm of a salmon farm downpipe, who's to say if he'll ever feel it?

There is, though, to be some progression the next time Fall Out Boy record. And not just new sponsors:

"[Billie Joe Armstrong] he didn't want to play four-chord punk rock for the rest of his life. If anybody knows anything about punk rock more than Billie Joe from Green Day, I don't know who it is. So I looked at that and their growth, and I think about how honest that is. They're really just true to what they are, and so that's how we are.

"I think we'll change stylistically, but at the end of the day, that's just something you wear. You're still yourself."

Lessons in being punk from Green Day. It's like picking up a primer for the EU constitution by Richard Littlejohn.