Portland show: Simple Plan stop show for 15 minutes after fan goes into epileptic seizure

Friday’s show in Portland was another one that SimplePlan.cz had its own correspondent present – Kristína – so prepare for another extensive recap of this sold-out show.

Some of the members of SP had their girlfriends, wives and children there, so naturally they wanted to spend as much time together as possible. According to Kristína, Chuck and his son London could have been seen together running alongside the stage and even in the photo pit before the set even started. And at the end of the show, Chuck even let London throw the last drumstick into the crowd.

The whole No Pads part of the show was going according to plan, everybody was having fun and the guys were giving it all they got. No wonder the guys themselves called it one of the best shows they played in a while. During the show, Pierre managed to get into a rather amusing situation, when he came up on stage and said this was the first time Simple Plan were playing this venue (Crystal Ballroom). A fan in the crowd however shouted back at him that they played the exact same venue last time they were in Portland, so Pierre responded: “Oh, okay, you probably know this stuff better than I do.” And turned to the whole crowd with the same excitement as earlier, shouting: “This is our SECOND TIME playing this venue!!”

On a more serious note however, when the encore’s “biggest hits” came around and after the initial Shut Up the second encore song Jump came rolling in, a girl in front row collapsed, forcing the band immediately stopped the show. It then took almost 15 minutes before they could resume it again. Below you can read how Kristína, who stood very close to the girl, recounted this part of the show to us:

“The guys were in the midst of ‘Jump’ when suddenly a girl in front row, who stood about 3 people away from me, went into a (I guess epileptic) seizure. She started shaking so much she eventually fell on the floor. Everybody immediately formed a big circle around her and created a corridor for security. The guys stopped playing and nobody knew what to do, because she didn’t just ‘faint’, where you more or less just need water to pick you up. So for about the first two minutes, it was pretty much all just chaos, nobody knew what to do (besides making that space around her), until a girl from backstage ran up to her and had paramedics on the phone, who told her what to do with the girl. After a few minutes, firefighters also came, as well as finally some paramedics and in the end she was okay, but the show had to be stopped for about 15 minutes.”

– Kristína (fan) –

Despite this experience, Kristína says it was a fantastic show and pointed out that it was not just because of the great performances of all four bands (The Bottom Line, Patent Pending, Set It Off and Simple Plan), but also because of the people working at the Crystal Ballroom venue that night – namely the security, which was very helpful and took care of the crowd as best as they could, handing out water to the exhausted fans and making sure everyone was ok.

And finally, make sure to check out our gallery to get a better glimpse at this show in Portland: