Gary Flockhart: Buddy can you spare a Nickelback?
Extreme though that sounds, my antipathy toward the Canadian warblers is far less extreme than that of a London man who has launched a campaign to stop the band from ever performing in the UK again.
As you may have read elsewhere, Craig Mandell is hoping to raise $1000 in a project titled #DontletNickelback, launched on crowdfunding website Tilt.com.
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Hide AdQuite how this stunt works, I’ve no idea, though Mandell aims to use the money to pay for “therapy for those who have been affected by the band”.
Before you crack out the Visa, you probably should know that $1 will pay for an email written on your behalf to the band’s management, urging Nickleback never to set foot on these shores again. Fork out $10 and they’ll send an explicit email to the band, and for as little as $50, they’ll send some of Nickelback’s music to Nickelback, presumably so they realise how awful they are and retire.
Meanwhile, frontman Chad Kroeger has laughed off the campaign, and is adamant that such negativity actually helps the group.
“All these critics, they’re just tireless,” says the ‘singer’. “They keep ragging on the band. If they had stopped writing all this stuff about us, there would be no controversy left in the band and we probably would’ve died out years ago. They’re responsible for us still being around.”
To be fair, Kroeger is right. Sure, Nickelback are – as is almost universally accepted – ‘the world’s worst band’, but it’s not like anyone forces you to go and see them.
That said, if anyone’s thinking about a petition to stop Apple forcing insipid U2 albums into our iTunes playlists without permission, I’ll gladly sign up for that.
Who cares that it was free? As Catherine Tate’s ‘Nan’ would say, “What a (expletive) liberty!”