“Yes and no,” he says. “I mean, I wouldn’t write songs like those today, but I still love playing them. My memory’s still good, I haven’t managed to destroy it just yet, so when I play them now, I always think back to when I was 17, and how great a time that was. Everyone asks if I hate playing those songs now, but I fucking love it and we play them every night.”
Sum 41 still put on a highly energetic show – to see them bouncing around on stage, it seems as if they must be getting the equivalent of a heavy work-out at the gym. I ask Whibley if this is the case, and he laughs, telling me it feels more like ten heavy training sessions. “You do feel very beat-up,” he says. “You come off stage with bloody knuckles and fingernails ripped off and blisters and bruises. It’s difficult to walk half the time on tour.” Performing is so strenuous that the band really don’t need any work-outs beside just showing up and playing.
“Fortunately, we’re still kind of young, so we don’t have to worry about that too much,” Whibley says. “I mean, we just got off tour about a week and a half ago. We’re tour-ready now, but if we were to go away for a year or two and then come back, we’d probably need to take a couple of runs to get ready and get prepared.”
Needless to say, Sub 41 attract a fairly devoted fan base. “I’m still surprised by the fact that, after this long, we can inspire passion in people,” Whibley says. “People often tell me how a song of ours came about at a very important point in their lives. I think rock music really speaks to something in people’s hearts, in a way that the Lady Gagas and the Justin Biebers of the world just don’t.”
Though I’ve been hesitant to mention the words ‘Avril Lavigne’ thus far, I can’t let Whibley go without a question about his infamous Halloween costume. Last year, he showed up to a party dressed as his ex-wife Avril, while a friend accompanied as her new husband, Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger. Whibley laughs nervously when I bring the subject up. “I came up with the idea about three or four days before Halloween,” he says. “It was actually just a small party at my house, but a lot of people turned up and started taking pictures. I woke up the next day to a thousand emails telling me, ‘Hey, you’re on this’ and ‘You’re on this’. We did it purely for the purposes of the party, but then someone took these photos and sent them out to people. We just thought it was fucking hilarious.
“I know Avril and Chad well, and they laughed it off, they were great with it.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
