Simple Plan Reveal Their Favourite Songs To Play Live

Canadian punk rockers Simple Plan are currently touring Australia, tearing up stages as special guests for The Offspring. But tomorrow night (10 May), they’ll play a one-off intimate headline show in Sydney where they’re set to celebrate their seminal second album, Still Not Getting Any...

Since their formation in Montreal in 1999, the band have released six albums, plus an EP and two live albums. From the early tunes from No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls (2002) and 2004’s Still Not Getting Any… to their most recent album, 2022’s Harder Than It Looks, Simple Plan have remained relevant and shared stages with the likes of blink-182, Green Day, and Avril Lavigne.

This time around, they’re here with The Offspring, but not without a sneaky little sideshow where they’ll play Still Not Getting Any… in its entirety for the first time.

Drummer Chuck Comeau said, “Still Not Getting Any… is one of our favourite albums we’ve made and last fall, it celebrated its twentieth anniversary!”

He added, “We haven’t had the chance to properly celebrate the milestone and because we are not big fans of just sitting around, we thought we would take advantage of the few days off we have in Australia and do something really special... something we’ve never done before anywhere else in the world!

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“We found a small, intimate venue and we’re gonna play the album in its entirety for our fans in Sydney! We’re not sure when or even if we’ll ever do this again, so you know this is gonna be a very special show. We hope to see you all at Liberty Hall on May 10th.”

To celebrate their upcoming Sydney show and their remaining dates with The Offspring, guitarist and backing vocalist Sébastien Lefebvre has shared his favourite Simple Plan songs to perform live with The Music. Check it out below.

Welcome To My Life

I love playing Welcome To My Life because it’s a good mix of being a vibe, a sing-along, and there’s some heaviness there in the chorus. And I love that, I love playing it.

Thank You

We just started playing Thank You again, that’s one of our fastest punk rock songs, so that’s always a good time as well.

Where I Belong

I love to play Where I Belong, which is one of our most recent songs. It’s heavy, it’s fun, and I’m a big fan of that one.

Astronaut

I also always like playing Astronaut as well. I think there’s good emotion there; people get out their cell phones in the crowd, so it looks like you’re actually in space. That’s definitely another big live favourite.

This Song Saved My Life

And another one that I like playing, we recently put this little medley together, and part of the medley was a song called This Song Saved My Life. We hadn’t played that one in a while, but there’s a strong band/fan connection on that one, so I’ve been really enjoying that too.

**Potential Future Favourite: Young & Dumb (Avril Lavigne feat. Simple Plan)**

I don’t want to spoil anything, and I don’t want to announce something that I’m not actually aware will happen or not. But last summer, when we were on tour with Avril [Lavigne], we played Addicted, which is one of our songs, with Avril joining us onstage. It’s a Simple Plan song, not an Avril Lavigne/Simple Plan song. We played that one then, so now that we have an Avril/Simple Plan song…who knows what might happen on this upcoming North American tour!

**Honorary Mentions from Still Not Getting Any… album**

In honour of the band’s headline sideshow in Sydney playing Still Not Getting Any… from start to finish for the first time ever.

We’re playing Still Not Getting Any… in full in Sydney for the first time ever, while we’re in Australia for this tour, the entire album from start to finish! Some of the songs have been in our more recent setlists, but some of them did need revisiting. We hadn’t played Thank You in a long time, as I touched on earlier, and we hadn’t played One from that album since we did a show in Montreal with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

That was another one that hadn’t been played in a really long time, and those two were the ones that needed the most dusting off. Even if Me Against the World, Perfect World and Promise are not part of our regular setlist, there’s songs that we’ll still sometimes play at soundchecks for fans and things like that, but not Thank You and One. And there’s also a song called Everytime that we’ve never played live as a band, ever, except for when Pierre [Bouvier] sometimes grabs the acoustic guitar before Perfect and jams that one out.

I always liked that version as well, so for this Sydney show we’re just like: okay, Pierre, you grab the acoustic guitar and you do that. That takes care of Everytime. For the rest of the band: let’s practice Thank You and let’s practice One, we’re going to nail it. And we did. And now we’ve actually added Thank You to The Offspring setlist because it’s such a fun song to play.