“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.
