Let’s Rock, Eh?

Avril Lavigne
Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, Belgium
March 8, 2003


“You know my songs, don’t you?” Avril Lavigne barks at two Belgian teenagers, Sophie and Thomas. Alarmed, they shuffle and look at the floor.

On the first three nights of the defiantly named Try to Shut Me Up! tour, Lavigne has picked a boy and a girl from the crowd to help sing her skippy first hit, “Complicated.” It’s a cute move, even if Bono thought of it first, but it went awry two nights ago in Stockholm. “The last person didn’t know my words,” Lavigne warns her Belgian volunteers. “You do know the words, don’t you?”

Averting an ugly scene, Sophie and Thomas are — to use Lavigne-speak — “frigging stars.” The latter is a swanlike beauty twice Lavigne’s height, with cap sleeves and excellent pipes; the former is a tone-deaf Belgian zit farm in a kind of rustic waistcoat. And they both know the words — all of them.

Lavigne, only 18, is a pro, and she expects 100 percent — even from her fans. Her precocious drive has brought her within spitting distance of 12 million global sales of her debut, Let Go. Proving herself live is the next step up the new-star ladder.

The newbie is learning fast. “Not going number two on the tour bus is the one main rule,” she tells Blender after the show. “And no matter how big you are or how many records you sell, you still have to shower in shitholes.”

Nineteen hundred of Lavigne’s people are in Brussels tonight, roughly two-thirds female. Ferried here by dads with Yosemite Sam mustaches, they rock skinny ties (though Lavigne has lately done away with the look) and make the opening “Sk8er Boi” nearly inaudible.

Even across a language barrier, Lavigne and her constituency understand one another. Boys who smoke weed and brag to their friends are bad; “Should I put out?” and “What if his parents hate me?” are the questions that matter. For a legion of church-bred would-be wild children like herself, Lavigne is a soul mate, the problems page of Teen People made flesh.

Musically, she’s a smart amalgam of modern influences. Her band’s pop-punk racket is loud and only slightly glib, and up close her singing is howitzer-strength and charmingly idiosyncratic, full of weird Canuck pronunciation (peause instead of pose; werr-reld instead of world).

But she lacks stagecraft — perhaps that’s unsurprising, since her first headlining tour is also her first tour of any kind. Unsure whether to act the sulky punkette or the puppyish pop moppet, she seems static and detached, while pick-tossing guitarist Evan Taubenfeld performs much of the “Are ya awlright, Brussels?” stuff.

Yet there are moments when Lavigne seems fully engaged. She wakes up for “Losing Grip” — Let Go’s churning, heavy opener — and the slow, gothy “Unwanted,” so it’s suddenly easy to imagine her playing to audiences eight times as large. These are the songs she cowrote with Céline Dion/Sheena Easton collaborator Cliff Magness, and she favors them over the breezier pop-rock purveyed by part-Brit production trio the Matrix. “My live show is more rock than the record,” Lavigne tells Blender later. “I prefer it that way.” Which might be why she leaves “Complicated,” her defining, adolescence-in-miniature hit, to be sung by guests.

Looking ahead, Lavigne sees more rock. The sting of her recent zero-Grammy haul will fade soon enough — “The majority of people who buy my records are my age. The Grammy voting committee … not so much,” she notes wisely — and her spring tour of large U.S. coliseums will sharpen her act.

“Thanks for being my fans,” she says giddily before leaving Brussels sated. Today, Belgium; tomorrow, the werr-reld.