Once a band or singer gets the “cringe” stamp it’s near impossible to shake off — they become people’s guilty secret. Take the Canadian rock band Nickelback, the subject of a new documentary, Hate to Love: Nickelback, in cinemas this week.
The group, founded by the brothers Chad and Mike Kroeger, shot to fame in the early 2000s with their sentimental hit How You Remind Me and went on to be nominated for six Grammys, selling out arenas. Yet soon the earnest rockers became targets of ridicule, disdainfully dismissed as a sanitised, corporate Nirvana Lite. In 2010 Nickelback lost a popularity contest against a pickle on Facebook. In the documentary the band recall Chad having people scream “F*** you!” at him as he walked
