Saturday 19/04/08 Simple Plan @ Astoria, London

The Astoria is a hub of activity this evening. Kids in Vans trainers and studded belts line the adjacent pavement, screaming and cheering and being dead excited because “Yay! Wicked! Simple Plan are playing tonight!" This is a 14+ gig. Great! These kids have been decorating the pavement since 3pm this afternoon – cheering and wooing. Back in the day, I was probably doing something similar for my fave bands (um on second thought, perhaps not). Tonight it’s an annoyance, mainly due to this time-space lapse; it takes me almost an hour to get into the venue – so I miss Kids in Glass Houses (the band I was most excited about seeing). **** queuing up since 3pm! That pet peeve aside, tonight was certainly surprising and not necessarily in a bad way.

From a furtive glance at the crowd, it seems Simple Plan are a bigger commodity these days than I’d give them credit for, remembering them most from their early Blink 182 inspired pop punk juvenility. Up until recently, I didn’t even know they were still going! Two successful albums later and they are still going, strong – it would seem.

‘Generation’ is certainly a force to be reckoned with. The crowd love it, singing along and shaking their emo hair. The band whip themselves into a frenzy on stage. ‘Shut Up!’ blasts from the shiniest amplifiers in the world, and the band are alive, and jumping up and down on stage, and singing their hearts out, and posturing and doing all those things that all the big bands do; saying, “Yeah you’re an amazing crowd!”, “Yeah man! Do what we say and clap!” - all the regular bullshit. But, though I really want to hate them, I just can’t; their energy is infectious! Even some of the older folk are jumping up and down, jingling their jangly bottoms along to the pop punk rifts. ‘Jump!’ follows and the entire crowd, unsurprisingly, jump! In the right places too! Oooh get you!

Assumed ‘Heart throb’, lead singer, Pierre Bouvier decides to sing us a little ditty about ‘London’ on his acoustic guitar. It’s a bit lame commenting on how hot the girls in London are; how he can’t afford to live here ‘cause the pound is ‘so ****ing strong’. And such waffle…