In conversation with Chuck Comeau from Simple Plan.

I remember turning on my TV and jumping between Video Hits and Rage for the weekly countdowns and new music spotlights, and a band I was immediately drawn to were the Canadian five-piece, Simple Plan. I mean, they were hard to avoid at that time because they had multiple chart-topping singles, and were featured in the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen film “New York Minute” (what a film, amiright?!). But they were everywhere, and their music was genuinely great. Over the years I started to go to their live shows when they toured Australia, and quickly realised the live stage was their domain. That’s where they really came to-life, and every tour they built upon the last, and have continued to do that right into 2024. 

The live show was a focus-point that Simple Plan identified early on in their career. They were on their first ever tour in the US in 2002 supporting Sugar Ray (remember “Every Morning”?), ahead of the release of their debut album “No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls”. It was a b-market college show tour where the band quickly learnt the realities of touring, and were traveling through the night to each city in a Winnebago driven by Pierre’s dad. It was also the first time the band had a crew for shows. 

“That tour really showed us how difficult it was going to be. We thought we were going to go on the road and play shows and were going to be huge straight away, but it wasn’t really like that. The first day the record came out we went to Best Buy to buy the album and it wasn’t available. Nobody had it. Nobody had even heard of the band. We realised it was going to be like getting one fan at a time. We really had to put in the work, and we had to go on the road and really earn it.” drummer Chuck Comeau explains. 

“We were on a major label, we had a big music video, and then nothing was happening. So I think it taught us to be resilient, be patient, and to learn that everything happens in the live space and on the road. That’s really where you can make your fanbase and can have control over your career. Because you don’t have control over if radio plays you, or whether MTV plays you. But you can control how good of a show you give every night, and how you interact with your fans”. 

Over the years when Simple Plan have toured Australia they’ve been joined by an impressive calibre of artists including Real Friends, Eat Your Heart Out, Short Stack, The Getaway Plan, The All American Rejects, Kisschasy, Forever Ends Here, Tonight Alive, Christina Parie, and New Empire. Reading that list of artists is like reading a dream festival lineup. And in 2024 they added to that list with Boys Like Girls, We The Kings, and Jax joining them for a sold out run of dates across the country. 

“I think it’s always important for us to try to bring something that people can look at and be like, ‘wow, this is an event that’s never going to happen again. I need to be there.’ While also trying to bring local bands too. We’ve made a lot of effort to do that in the past, and I think it’s really important to support the local scene. But I think at the same time there’s an excitement for people here to have bands that don’t always come on tour, and build them together. It’s a pretty rare occasion to have a massive lineup like this one. The fans are going to hear many massive songs that they can sing along to all night long”. 

Whilst they were on that first tour in 2002 they were also really taken aback by how kind and welcoming Sugar Ray were to them. They really took time to interact with Simple Plan and create a safe space backstage that they’ve now brought into their touring world as a headliner.  Jax took to her socials reiterating the sentiment of how Simple Plan felt touring with Sugar Ray to them. “It is SO refreshing to be on tour with such warm, respectful, humble men. We just arrived in Melbourne, and these boys have already made every supporting act, crew member, tech, spouse, driver, and venue staff feel like an equal” she revealed via Instagram 

I’m sitting across from Chuck at their first of two sold out shows at Hordern Pavilion in Sydney. He guesses this is somewhere between their twelfth to fifteenth visit to Australia. And notably this is their biggest production tour of the country yet. The staging sees a massive lighting rig and LED screen across the stage, and then they have pyro, C02 cannons, confetti , beach balls, and Scooby Doo costumes as extra production gimmicks. But at the heart of it is still all about the music and the band. “For a long time we felt like the most important thing we had to focus on was making sure the band was playing the best show. Now I think we realise that you can do that, and you can still add the production and it just makes the show even better.”

Lead vocalist Pierre Bouvier runs across the stage with an energy that is unparalleled from any of the other bands on stage earlier in the night and immediately captures the audience with his playful attitude. And while your eyes are darting across the stage with him, they also make sure each band member has their own individual moment which cements why they’ve been able to keep doing this for over 22 years as a collective. They’ve never seemed tighter on stage than they do on this tour, and they feel like an unbreakable unit. 

But Chuck notes that they have had a particularly rough tour in the past which taught them to set up boundaries and reminded them to have fun. It was their third album tour (self-titled), and they were a bit burned out after touring back to back on the first and second records. “It was 2008, and we were non-stop touring and writing. I think it’s a great record and I’m really proud of it, but it didn’t do as well commercially. I think there was a lot of disappointment in that because we had put a lot of time, effort, and energy into it. So to see it not do as well, and then see the show’s getting a little bit smaller was tough. Especially towards the end as we did seven or eight weeks in Europe in the middle of winter, and then came home in December questioning why.”

“But I think it was great in a way as it led to the fourth record, and to us kind of like looking at each other going “hey, if we’re going to keep doing this, we have to make it more fun as that wasn’t really fun”. And then we made a really fun record that was more us. It was a return to our roots, and the subsequent tour was amazing and really fun”.

The setlist for this 2024 tour spans every album from “No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls” right through to “Harder Than It Looks”, which Chuck notes is an artform within itself to get right. “It’s really one of the hardest parts of building a show. If you play too many new songs, then you can’t play the big song that everybody wants to hear. So it’s really a tricky balance”. For this tour though they’ve created some medleys where they play the first chorus, or two verses and two choruses of each song. And they’ve been playing some b-side fan favourites from soundtracks like “Vacation” (New York Minute) and “Grow Up” (Scooby Doo, and Disney Extreme Skate Adventure – aka the best Playstation game to ever exist). “Sometimes you gotta play songs for the hardcore fans, the ones that know everything. Because yes, you gotta make sure if you’re playing 10,000 people that it’s an amazing show, and there’s no moments where people are like, “what is this song”, but you also gotta cater to that 100 people in the front row that are going to seven shows on the tour and it might be their 20th show. You gotta give them something that’s not just like the obvious stuff”. 

Songs like “Jump”, “Where I Belong”, “I’m Just A Kid”, “Perfect”, and “Welcome To My Life” feel so special with everybody screaming every lyric along with them. And a hit that is continuing to feel massive in the show is “Jet Lag”, which comes at a perfect time with the song’s collaborator Natasha Bedingfield having a pop-culture resurgence. But Chuck comments that they’ve somehow never actually performed it with her over the years, and agrees that they need to change that, and maybe 2024 is the year.

But it’s not just the hits and old fan favourites that are resonating well in this show, it’s also the new material from “Harder Than It Looks”. A clear standout is “Iconic” which the band brought Jax onstage to perform on the Australian leg. “It feels big, bombastic, and fun, and we didn’t really have a song like that in the past. We have streamers going off during it, and the energy is always good. It’s also a cool song to play for me personally live on the drums.”

Simple Plan are on top of their game, and this tour of Australia proved that. Walking out of the sold out Hordern Pavilion, the crowd is ecstatic and gushing over the setlist and the arena level production they just witnessed, along with a nostalgic line-up which had them screaming every lyric all night long. And as I eavesdropped on the excited conversations on the lightrail back into the city I smiled as they successfully built this band on live shows like this and winning over one fan at a time.