While touring the UK in 2003, Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger was one angry dude. When an audience member gave the Canadian band a middle-fingered salute, he reportedly responded by trying to have security throw out the concertgoer.
On the same tour, a British journalist managed to cross the then-poodle-haired singer during an interview — Kroeger publicly challenged the hack to a boxing match.
That combative temperament, coupled with the band’s famously awful hits (“How You Remind Me,” “Someday”), made hating Nickelback a sport for music fans the world over.
More than a decade later, the music is still largely atrocious.
Their new album, “No Fixed Address,” out this week, is filled with the same watered-down grunge rock as always. But what has changed is the band’s ability to deal with the angry barbs fired at them. Instead of fighting them, Kroeger, guitarist/keyboardist Ryan Peake, bassist Mike Kroeger and drummer Daniel Adair have learned to embrace the hostility.
Their acceptance of their pariah status has paid off.
The band’s last album, “Here and Now,” sold 2 million copies worldwide — about the same as Lady Gaga’s “ARTPOP,” but with a fraction of the promotional budget. “No Fixed Address” will likely sell a similar number, and the band has a huge list of arena dates lined up for 2015.
The first major sign that Nickelback was turning the hatred to its advantage came when a Detroit Lions fan started an online petition to cancel the group’s 2011 Thanksgiving Day halftime show. “So we really want the rest of the US to associate Detroit with Nickelback?” the petition asked.
The performance went on, with the band later spoofing themselves in a Funny or Die video, in which one member dressed as Detroit-born star Tom Selleck.
And when a fellow musician, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, attacked, telling Rolling Stone in 2012 that “rock ’n’ roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world” — the band tweeted out a thanks.
Just last month, a campaign waged by Londoner Craig Mandell attempted to raise money to keep Nickelback out of his city forever. For a $1 pledge, he offered to send an e-mail to the band to request that they didn’t play. The campaign raised a paltry $339.
After that, Chad Kroeger admitted the hate helps.
“If [the critics] had stopped writing all this stuff about us, there would be no controversy . . . and we probably would have died out years ago. They don’t know that they’re still responsible for us being around today.”