Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger halts Birmingham show and jumps off stage to fan in front row
Nickelback were half way through their gig at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena tonight when lead singer Chad Kroeger stopped the music and leapt off the front of the stage.
The 49-year-old had been performing with the band as part of their Get Rollin’ Tour to promote their latest album, their first to be released in five years.
The arena in Birmingham was almost sold out – with fans screaming along to hit tunes such as Savin’ Me, Someday, and Animal.
Read more:Nickelback at Utilita Arena Birmingham review – ‘this is one band that won’t ever be cancelled’
But Chad stopped the music so he could hop off the front of the stage and give an eager fan a hug. The woman, in the front row, had a sign which read “This is my 40th show – Chad, hug?” and he read it aloud to the crowd and said ‘Ok, I’ll give you a hug – I think 40 shows deserves a hug!”
He played a couple more songs and then declared he needed a breather, so hopped down off the stage to give the lucky fan a big hug, much to her delight.
The band had a huge amount of fun on stage tonight, their last night in the UK for this tour. Chad read out more signs to the crowd including one that said ‘Nickelback virgin’ and another that read ‘Please can you sing S.E.X’. Chad obliged and sang a section of the song acoustic, which was met by roars of approval from the audience.
Nickelback has been one of the most visible, successful, and extremely polarizing bands of the last two decades, but often shadowed in some kind of darkness or tragedy. The band’s music, often either hard and sludgy, or dark and melancholy, just might reflect the lived experience of the members of Nickelback, formed in a small town in Alberta in the 1990s. Directed by brothers Chad and Mike Kroeger, Nickelback is a phenomenally successful rock band, one of the bestselling of the 21st century, and if you were born in 2002, the Canadian group’s No. 1 hit “How You Remind Me” is the most popular song the year you were born.
For while Nickelback has sold tens of millions of albums and scored a long string of big radio hits, it hasn’t always been “Sunny Side Up” or brought them fame for “All the Right Reasons.” Both professionally and personally, the band and its orbit have been consistently beset by bad news, health problems, lawsuits, emotional pain, and some of the nastiest criticism in recent memory. Here’s a look at the frequently tragic and difficult lives of the rock stars in Nickelback.
Chad Kroeger formed the first version of Nickelback in the mid-1990s with his brother and cousin, after a rocky childhood in the small town of Hanna, Alberta. He was raised by his mother and eventually a stepfather, following the departure of his father when the future rock star was two years old. In the hit “Photograph,” Kroeger sings of the “half a dozen times” he broke into a school where he regularly failed to attend classes. In reality, young Kroeger was convicted as a minor on a charge of breaking into his junior high, for which he spent two months in a juvenile detention facility.
