November 11, 2005

Simple Plan Won't Let A Few Numb Teeth Stop Them From Touring

By James Montgomery (MTV.com)

Attention all angry concertgoers looking to chuck bottles at Simple Plan on their current tour: Bring it on.

Actually don't. Someone might get hurt. But less than two months after they were forced to cut short a homecoming show in Stratford, Ontario, when frontman Pierre Bouvier was clocked in the face with a bottle, Simple Plan want you to know that they've been through worse. And they've always bounced back.

"We know what it's like to play a show where you're hated, and that show wasn't it. There was no animosity in the air or anything. It was a great show that for some reason, someone decided to throw a bottle that was full, and they had really good aim, and it landed on my face," Bouvier laughed. "I was really bummed out that we couldn't finish the show, because it was really good coming back home. It was just a stupid incident, and it sucks that it had to happen on the day that we came back home, but I'm fine ... I just [still] can't feel my teeth. It takes more than that to stop us."

"We've had a bunch of bottles thrown at us before, and we know what it's like to be hated. It wasn't like a Warped [Tour] show date with like five haters and a bunch of bottles," drummer Chuck Comeau added. "It's ironic that after a bunch of shows where we got pelted with bottles, nothing [else] happened, and then the one show where like five bottles get thrown, it's like, 'Bang!' "

The band will return to Ontario in early December on its North American tour -- the umpteenth in support of last year's Still Not Getting Any ... -- and then head to the U.K. for a string of dates that runs until the middle of February. After that they'll finally put the record to bed. But at the moment, they've still got one more single to promote, the somber "Crazy." So why don't we let Bouvier do just that.

"['Crazy' is] about all the bad things in the world. It could've been a 12-minute song with each verse about a different topic, but that wouldn't work," he said. "So it's about a few specific things: the gap between the rich and the poor around the world ... how women are objectified in the media, and all the stereotypes they're supposed to live up to."

Word. So with the end of the Still Not Getting Any ... promotional cycle in sight, just when can we expect SP to get to work on a follow-up? Well, as they've told us in the past, they aren't exactly the nose-to-the-grindstone types, so it'll be a while. But just how long of a while?

"We're trying to get some sleep, man. We don't really write on the road, and since we're always on the road, we haven't written anything," Bouvier said. "But after our European tour, we're going to write for about three months and knock it all out at once. Hopefully we'll have a new album done by next fall."