Nickelback: “If we’re the thing you get most upset about, you’re living a charmed life”

Your new documentary is called Hate to Love. But in 2019, who did Slipknot’s Corey Taylor claim had replaced Nickelback as the world’s most hated band?

“Oh, fuck yeah! Thank you, Corey! He anointed Imagine Dragons as the new most hated band – they’re dear friends of ours too.”

CORRECT.

“As an addendum, I believe that, sadly, Machine Gun Kelly has now had the crown fall on his head because he’s getting pilloried by the media and it’s terrible. It never ceases to amaze me how little people have to do to bring the hammer of public vitriol down on them. I’ve no idea what he’s done, but I guess he’s winning!”

Have you ever given them any advice on how to deal with the opprobrium –  is there a New Nickelback survivors’ club?

“I’ve never talked to Imagine Dragons about this, but I’ve a pretty good idea they don’t give a fuck, because they’re killing it. ‘Radioactive’ is one of the biggest-selling singles in history. But I should temper that by saying even if you’re on top of the world, you still want to feel loved and liked, and negativity sucks. So I would imagine there’s two sides to that having lived it.”

In 2018, a jokey Facebook petition went viral for which Seattle band to reunite with Nickelback frontman (and your brother) Chad Kroeger on vocals?

“I’ve never heard about this. Tell me more! [Laughs] Alice in Chains?”

WRONG. Nirvana. The proposed venue for ‘Nickelvarna’ was The Nirvana Hair and Beauty Bar in Manchester.

“[Laughs] I like that one!”

Talking of the seminal grunge group, a fake Dave Grohl account (which some journalists assumed was real) used to tweet out Nickelhate such as: “If you play a Nickelback song backwards, you’ll hear messages from the devil. Even worse, if you play it forwards, you’ll hear Nickelback”…

“What was funny was that directly after that happened, we had Dave Grohl in our dressing room at the Forum in Los Angeles, and I got to ask him about it. He explained his Twitter was being impersonated, and I poured him a Crown Royal and Coke, and we hung out.”

Still, the real Nirvana member Krist Novoselic defended you in 2019 after Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt compared Nickelback to the “danger” of socialism*. The bassist tweeted:  “Who is this jerk? Nickelback is a power pop rock band & I love them!”

“He wasn’t necessarily throwing himself on the railway tracks for us so much as rightly pointing out the outsized reaction. It was more an appeal to reality! The journey in this thing is you start off in a band, and you get a few fans in the small microcosm you’re in, and you’re the secret only they know about, and that makes it special to them. But when you become ubiquitous, a very loud vocal minority spews vitriol. Human sentiment moves like a blob, and when everybody’s saying something sucks, nobody wants to be the lone detractor.

“The thing we came to realise through all of this is as much as the word ‘hate’ is used, it’s pretty overstated because people don’t really care that much. [Laughs] If Nickelback is the thing you get most upset about, you’re living a charmed life. Nobody’s trying to kill you, and you’re not starving to death. If our band is the level in which your hate exists, boy, you’re living in a fairy tale!”

Have any celebrities who slagged you off in the past later apologised?

“Not enough! [Laughs]”

*He said: “Our generation and prior generations fought hard against the scourge of Nickelback and to show what the dangers are of emo pop-ballad ’90s rocks. And now a new generation has come along that has forgotten the hazards of the past, and now are playing with these ideas. It’s very, very dangerous.” Even the tumbleweed didn’t laugh. 

Name three superhero franchises that Nickelback songs have appeared in.

“OK: we originally endeavoured to write a song for the Batman Dark Knight trilogy, which was ‘Savin’ Me’,  but it didn’t work out. We got on Deadpool, The Punisher, and ….oh shit, what’s the third one? Help me!”

WRONG. Apart from The Punisher (with track ‘Slow Motion’) and the teaser for Once Upon a Deadpool, you could have had Titans (‘Burn It to the Ground’), Daredevil (‘Learn the Hard Way’), and we’d even have accepted Chad’s contribution to the soundtrack of 2002’s Spider-Man (‘Hero’).

“This is a combination of having too long a career and too short a memory! The Deadpool scene where Ryan Reynolds and Fred Savage argue over Nickelback’s achievements before singing ‘How You Remind Me’ together was hilarious and snaps tightly around how absurd the dialogue around our band is. I was here for it! I’d love to meet Ryan one day, but he’s the busiest man in existence. He’s everywhere and nowhere – like a phantom!”

In a 2018 Saturday Night Live sketch called ‘Dying Mrs Gomez’, an elderly Nickelback fan’s last words are the lyrics to your 2001 monster hit ‘How You Remind Me’. How did she die?

“I can’t remember because I only watched it once, and I couldn’t make it to the end because I was laughing so hard!”

WRONG. She passed away from falling into the moshpit at a Nickelback concert. ‘How You Remind Me’ was the most played song on US radio in the 2000s decade. Ever get sick of it?

“For me, it was that old expression of being in the eye of a hurricane, meaning all hell’s breaking loose around you, but you’re in a place of calm and largely insulated from what’s going on and too busy to notice. It was the most-played radio song in the world in 2001 – I have an award for that in my studio! I can’t think on that scale. That’s like thinking about space travel in a realistic and experiential way – I don’t even know what the hell is going on down here, let alone going into space. But I’ve never been sick of that song – it’s a blessing and changed my life.”

In 2016, Kensington Police Service on Prince Edward Island, Canada, apologised after humorously threatening that anyone caught drink-driving would be made to listen to which Nickelback album on the way to the station?

“Oh, I don’t know this one!”

WRONG. They pledged to play their “perfectly good unopened copy” of Nickelback’s third album ‘Silver Side Up’ as punishment before issuing a mea culpa for joining in the Nickelbacklash.

“Well, they didn’t have to apologise! [Laughs] That would probably be good listening for getting taken to jail. I’m not mad at that. Getting taken to jail is something you never forget, so if we’re the soundtrack to an event like that, I’m fine with it.”

Which four “Detroit heroes” do you dress as in a 2011 Funny or Die skit responding to a petition (another one!) to stop Nickelback playing at the Detroit Lions’ NFL Thanksgiving game?

“I dressed as my friend Alice Cooper, Chad was RoboCop, Ryan [Peake, keyboardist/rhythm guitarist] was Magnum P.I., and Danel [Adair, drummer] was stand-up comedian Dave Coulier.”

CORRECT.

“I really need to win this! [Laughs] I forgot to tell Alice Cooper  I dressed up as him – it’s not something that would naturally come up on a golf course.”

Did you and Chad ever rock any good Halloween costumes growing up?

“We used to dress up as the guys from Mötley Crüe – the idea that it was cool to be a rock star was something we embraced early!”

 

On the single cover of Nickelback’s 2006 hit ‘Rockstar,’ the tabloid-style artwork claims that a strip club has banned a boyband for what?

“[Laughs] I don’t know!”

WRONG. “A sock-puppet-related incident”.

“That’s a nugget! Gun to my head on that one, I would have got shot! There’s no access to that fact in my brain! That ‘Rockstar’ caught fire was unexpected. It was our ‘Aloha’ single – that last one you put out that doesn’t really work, but I feel we were able to exploit the gap in the English sensibility, which is prim and proper and likes to be outraged by things.  We were in the studio making the next record, and we had to fly to England to play some shows to support it, and then thusly it popped everywhere, which was awesome.”

Last year, which Scottish singer-songwriter covered ‘How You Remind Me’ and ‘Rock Star’ onstage with Chad?

“Is that Lewis Capaldi?”

CORRECT. Lewis declared ‘Rock Star’ “the greatest song by any Canadian artist.”

“I was really reaching on that! My brother is friends with him, but I’m not that familiar with him, so I was going out on a limb with that one!”

Artists such as Lizzo and SZA have outed themselves as ‘Back fans, with the latter recently commenting: ‘Wait, you know what’s crazy? Do white people hate Creed and Nickelback? Why? Black people love them! They rock! That shit is the bomb!’. Who’s been the most unexpected? 

“The one I never would have guessed is Harley Flanagan, the lead singer from hardcore band Cro-Mags. I met him on the Jujutsu mat in New York City, and he said: ‘Fuck all those haters, they’re just jealous. They all want to be you’, and then he signed a copy of his book Hard-Core: Life of My Own for me. The SZA quote was funny, but realistically, I don’t take any sentiment people put in the press – positive or negative – seriously. You take it all with a grain of salt!”

Nickelback once paid a drum technician £235 to stick what into the blades of an electric fan?

“That was an early tour in Germany, and Chad paid him to put his cock into a fan.”

CORRECT.

“I thought it was a lot less! Back then, we didn’t have to pay people much to do things. We were all broke! We should have got him down!”

In 2019, Nickelback had a video posted on Twitter by then-President Donald Trump removed for copyright infringement, which criticised Joe Biden and was based on the popular ‘Photograph’ meme. By how many per cent did Nickelback downloads jump by after his tweet? A bonus point for expressing it in the form of a graph.

“[Uproarious laughter] Come on, how am I supposed to know this one? Thank you, Donald Trump, though, I guess. What’s the statistic?”

WRONG. Downloads surged by 569 per cent. How are you feeling about the upcoming US election – do you worry Trump might use Nickelback songs at his rallies?

“We all have political ideas, but we don’t involve Nickelback in them because our individual views are different. As far as the upcoming election, it looks like it’s a re-run of 2020 and a bit of a mess.”

Ever sent a Nickelback meme?

“When the Kim Kardashian body type was popular, there was a ‘Thickelback’ meme, where we were photoshopped with narrow waists and huge asses and that was sent around the band a lot.”

Tell us about your documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback.

“With a dearth of real information about Nickelback, it’s been up to the media to compose their own narrative, and this is our opportunity to tell our own story from our perspective. A lot of the negativity around us was our fault for not sharing our truth because we were too busy writing, recording and touring.”

The verdict: 4/10

“I was pretty much an average C student at school!”

Nickelback: Hate To Love is in select cinemas worldwide on March 27 and 30, with tickets available here. The band tours the UK from March 16.

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