2023-06-07 21:06:16
After Celine Dion and Paul McCartney, it’s Nickelback’s turn to use the Videotron Center to hold rehearsals before launching a tour.
For two days, the quartet has been fine-tuning the staging of the tour show down to the smallest detail. Get Rollin’which will be presented for the first time in Quebec, next Monday, then at the Bell Center in Montreal, two days later.
Word of Chad Kroeger, that the Journal met Wednesday at the Videotron Center with his colleague Ryan Peake, nothing is left to chance during these days of preparations, so long that they prevent the members of the Canadian group from enjoying the charms of the capital.
“Until the wee hours of the morning, we replay every song, every piece of lighting and pyrotechnics, everything that is playing on the screen. All. We make sure every moment has the most impact possible.”
“It’s a lot of work,” adds the singer, confessing the need for band members to oversee everything.
“If something doesn’t go well or isn’t to our liking, it’s our fault because we haven’t invested enough time.”
Return of pyrotechnics
For the first time in ten years, pyrotechnics will be used during a Nickelback concert.
You had to see the amazed faces of Kroeger and Ryan Peake when tests interrupted our interview.
“We never get tired,” said Peake, watching the jets of flame from the boxes.
Why did you abandon them at the time then?
“It had become our signature, but we used it so much that we had become a pyro group. (…) We had come to a point where we wanted people to come for the songs. Because they are good”, tell the musicians.
Quebec was not easy
Despite the cruel jokes it was the subject of, Nickelback and its 50 million albums sold marked the history of music in the country. They were even inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in March.
What are they most proud of? Their durability, says Ryan Peake.
“And transport our music to as many places in the world, he adds. Come to Quebec. It was not easy to impose ourselves in Quebec for us. Quebec and Montreal, it was difficult.
Fires that worry
Residents of western Canada, the guys from Nickelback are obviously closely following the situation of the forest fires that are raging from one end of the country to the other.
“My cousin Chris had to evacuate Grande Prairie. He was showing me pictures of the sky at his house and I told him to pack everything he likes in a truck and drive to Edmonton. I asked him to call me when he arrives,” says Chad Kroeger.
“You tell yourself that we are in 2023, it cannot happen, and it is happening. I live in Abbotsford, forty minutes from Vancouver and every summer, as soon as the wind turns and the sky fills with smoke, on TV, we are advised not to go out. It’s like that every summer. This is the new reality.”
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