Patrick shares his insight into SP history: explains how Mark Hoppus (blink-182) wanted SP to be called 'One-legged duck'

On this week’s Man Of The Hour show, Patrick and Sebastien delved into the history of Simple Plan by Patrick pulling out a story from the very very early days of Simple Plan, a story that has been a legend for quite a while. Yes, the ‘One-legged duck’ story.

Now, you may recall the legend that Mark Hoppus from blink-182 once tried to convince Simple Plan to choose the name ‘One-legged duck’ and in fact we even had Chuck, Pierre and Seb confirm this ‘legend’ to be true in our 2015 SimplePlan.cz interview from Antwerp [rewatch it here!]. But how exactly did this attempt at baptizing the band this somewhat extraordinary name come about? That’s where Patrick’s story comes in.

By the way, during the course of the story, you’ll see Patrick using mostly the name ‘Three-legged duck’ since he himself wasn’t sure if the duck was to be one or three-legged, but since the legend so far has exclusively been about ‘One-legged duck’, we’re gonna stick with that.

If you haven’t listened to the latest Man Of The Hour episode, you can do so below as well as you can read the story of how Simple Plan got almost named ‘One-legged duck’, as told by Patrick Langlois:

Patrick: “When I was 19 years old, I used to always go see blink-182 shows as long as they were in like a 6-hour radius from Montreal. The legend goes… It’s not a legend, it’s an actual true story.. I went to see blink-182 in Albany and my buddy Chuck tagged along. We went to the show in Albany, it was like a college show and so, there weren’t like many people there and we ended up backstage, hanging out the boys from blink-182 with Mark, with Tom and with Travis. And Chuck had his like one claim to “fame” to Mark that his old band Reset had played shows with blink-182. So he was like ‘Hey, I don’t know if you remember me..’ And that’s kind of [how] we get backstage, we end up chilling with Mark, who’s got nothing better to do and through that forms this like tiny little friendship between Simple Plan and blink-182.

Now fast-forward to a year later, blink-182 are playing every single day of the Warped Tour, Enema Of The State has just dropped in June and we end up backstage again. I’m with Chuck, we end up sitting on the bus, Chuck plays Mark some Simple Plan demos.. And at this point in time, the band isn’t even baptized yet. It’s not called Simple Plan. As per legend again, you may have read this, if you know your Simple Plan history quite well, like on old demos, you guys would write ‘Touchdown’. And so Mark is like: ‘Oh you guys don’t have a band name yet?’ And he tried really hard for good like 5-10 minutes to convince Chuck to call the band ‘Three-legged-duck’.”

Seb: “Yes!”

Patrick: “Did you know this story?”

Seb: “Wait, was it ‘One-legged-duck’ or ‘Three-legged-duck’?”

Patrick: “One or three!”

Seb: “Odd number of legs on a duck. Yes. I know this.”

Patrick: “I believe it’s ‘Three-legged-duck’.. And Chuck is like, you know, wants to be polite: ‘Oh yeah, that’s kind of cool..’ But I guess [he] doesn’t love it.”

Seb: “And obviously that’s why Mark keeps going. Cause he sees Chuck.”

Patrick: “And Mark is like ‘Yeah, yeah, keep going, ‘Three-legged-duck’. Someone needs to call their band name ‘Three-legged-duck’! What a cool band name!’ And that didn’t happen but Mark Hoppus tried to convince Simple Plan to be baptized ‘Three-legged-duck’.”

Seb: “That would’ve been great.”

– Man Of The Hour (s28e08) –