Sum 41

Sum 41

During the last day of Graspop Metal Meeting while the sun was burning us all. We at RMP found some motivation to have an in too deep interview with Jason ‘cone’ Paul and  Dave Baksh of Sum 41.

 

Hi and welcome to your first time at graspop. How has the festival been so far?

Dave: We’ve been up fro like an hour [laughs], so we ran into our friends from Steel Panter and that’s about it. I freaked out because I saw Primus was right across the walkway from us so I want to see if I can shake that golden bashand.

 

Are there any of your personal favorite bands playing here today?

D: Scorpions, Suicidele, …

Jason: Yeah, Steel Panter,….

D: Primus for me

J: Hatebreed…

D: Ow yeah Hatebreed, that’s right! I love that work that Jamie did with Body Count. I thought that was pretty rad. Who else? ..

J: I mean there so many bands so …

D: we briefly looked at the schedule today and those are kinda who we want to see. And Zombie too, I don’t know if we mentioned Rob Zombie.

 

You already played in Belgium this year at the AB and you had big balloons and you’re own version of an inflatable Iron Maiden’s ‘Eddie’ with you. Can we expect specials today when you close the last day at the Jupiler stage?

D: Ohw, yeah it’s an inflatable ‘bonesy’ we can’t call our guy Eddie. Eddie is exclusive to Iron Maiden. He doesn’t moonlight or anything like that. But today?

J: It’s a shorter set for us so we're gonna play a lot of songs that people know. I don’t think we're gonna go too deep into our albums. It’s only 50 minutes so it's hard to experiment to much.

 

Why the ‘bonesy’ figure?

D: We always wanted an inflatable, from like the early 2000’s.

J: Actually, funny enough we were talking about it on the last album, after we saw primus at a festival in Hungary. They had two of them.

D: Ow yeah, you were telling me about it.

J: it’s was so windy out there, they blow around, so they had to tie them down. But I remember when we were leaving the festival, we all thought, that’s so cool. So now we have one. [laughs]

D: So we took the first mascote from our first dvd, and it is basically a skeleton taking a shit with a camera in his hand. (Introduction To Destruction) We decided to blow that up.

 

After 6 years guys are back with an new album called “13 voices”, we were all still waiting on some new material. How has the response been so far?

D: It’s been wild, we never expected this, it kinda started a world tour for us right?

J: yeah, it’s kinda just a hard-rock album, it’s not heavier than everything we have ever done before and it’s not copied. And our fans seem to like it. We are playing a lot of the new songs live and things are going good.

D: It’s awesome to see the different generation join in and sing along to the songs. It’s really cool.

 

What’s your personal favorite song on the new album?

J: I like ‘God save us all”.

D: Yeah; I like “Breaking the chain”  and the title track “13 voices”. That’s are my favorites.

 

Everybody knows Deryck had some problems. How did you cope with the struggles Deryck had as a band?

D: You where in the band at the time, right?

J: it was just a hard situation. I mean we know each other from we were 14 years old, all of us. So you go true you're 20’s and you party and drink a lot. Like we did, we partied a lot but he ended up having a problem with it. So we done a lot of reflecting like that, we changed things, this and that way. The whole situation was unfortunate and the good thing about is that he is healthy and that’s all we can really ask for. And where here playing stuff so that’s good.

D: I remember I booked a blood test that day, to see if my lever would match his. And then it ended up that I didn't have to go.

 

Dave you can play almost every metal song? What’s your personal favorite metalsong or metalband?

D: My favorite one to play, honestly, I play it before every single show that we play, an it’s hallowed be thy name. If I don’t play it before every show than the show won't go right.

 

Cone you got your name because you ate ice cream as lunch at school, is that right?

[laughter]

J: This name is gonna keep going until I am dead.

D: Yeah, we’ve got to give you a cooler nickname.

J: it’s not that funny now that I am 37 years old. 

D: Maybe we can change the story so that you beat someone up with an ice cream cone. Yeah there we go, that’s the new meaning.

J: icecreamboy, yeah that’s what we gonna do.

[laughter]

 

Thank you so much for this interview. Do you have some last words for our readers?

D: Thanks for coming along and thanks for checking out the article. What else can we say, where 20 years old now. We hope we have many more years!