To get you even more excited about the return of the No Pads tour (starting again in August), SimplePlan.cz prepared an exclusive series of “No Pads special” articles, giving you little possibly never-seen-or-heard-before interesting flashbacks to the No Pads era.
The third installment of the SimplePlan.cz No Pads special leads us to the album itself – particularly to its title: “No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls”. The title started the trend of practically every follow-up Simple Plan album having a double entendre (all besides the self-titled one). But how did the guys even come up with this classic title? Since social media wasn’t really big back in the beginning of the 00s, there isn’t that many interviews available online that we could rely on when it comes to digging up old information. But we still did manage to find a couple of them, in which the band discussed the meaning behind this funny title.
In the first interview for Kidzworld, Sebastien and Chuck were directly asked about the title, and having never taken themselves too seriously – their answer was precisely that: they just needed a name and this one was goofy enough to represent their “love for balls”. As simple as that:
Seb: “Well… we just like balls! Basketballs, you know we just like to play with them – any kind of balls.”
Chuck: “Footballs, meatballs… we might as well be honest and just say it.”
While the previous answers didn’t really give us any actual meaning behind the title, one side-meaning of it was revealed by Jeff in the 2003 interview for Idobi radio:
Jeff: “I mean, we found a second meaning to it too afterwards! You know, it takes a lot of balls for five Canadian boys from Montreal to get out there and wanna conquer the world..”
Pierre: “It takes ten.”
Jeff: *laughs* “It takes ten balls.”
Chuck: “Five pairs.”
I think we could agree that since the title was mostly created as a fun play on words to best introduce the new band as a fun-loving, not-taking-themselves-too-seriously band, the best part about this title is that it’s up for interpretation and any fan can find a different meaning behind it. What would YOUR interpretation of the title be? Let us know in the comments below!
