In May 2013, Rolling Stone polled its readers in an attempt to discover which band might be crowned the worst of the 1990s. The winners – or losers, depending on how you look at it – were Creed, trailed in second place by Nickelback. Eleven years on and Creed appear to have turned that status around, in America at least – Vanity Fair, Vice and Slate have noticed that they have, whisper it, become cool. And Nickelback? Well, no one’s claiming coolness for them: last year they released a documentary called Hate to Love: Nickelback, a recognition of the fact that, outside their fanbase, they are usually mentioned only as a punchline.
They can afford to laugh about it because their fanbase has turned out to be large enough to make them very successful – they’ve spent 20 years filling arenas. Creed, on the other hand, had to fall apart and disappear before they were allowed their come-back. Both bands had emerged from the musical hellscape known as ‘post-grunge’, in which bands shouted loudly about feeling unhappy. It was an attempt to resurrect a model perfected by Nirvana – with few doing it anywhere near as well. But Nickelback realised the traps of that, and quickly became a jack-of-all-trades hard-rock band, offering a little bit of everything to everyone.
At the O2 their crowd encompassed older men in leather, young women looking for a party and everyone in between. To my mild surprise, I noticed a middle-aged lesbian couple singing the ballad ‘Photograph’ to each other. And hearing the songs one after another it was very easy to appreciate the craftsmanship in them: they are constructed to hit pleasure point after pleasure point.
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