It is hard to believe that Nickelback’s Dark Horse tour can still be trundling on. It began in Europe in 2008 and is not scheduled to finish until June this year, when the band will play a show in their home town of Vancouver. That’s an awful lot of fireworks and F-words and clanging power chords and “orgasmic” drum solos and jaded rock-star poses to wade through. But the group showed absolutely no sign of letting up on any of these fronts at Wembley.
If anything the quartet’s brand of militant rock’n’roll populism has grown more virulent as their globe-straddling circus has gathered momentum, crushing all objections on grounds of musical taste or propriety under its huge, turbo-powered wheels.
The show began (and ended) with dramatic and noisy bursts of pyrotechnics. Striding onto a set that looked like a spaceship hangar, the men in black took up their positions and blasted into a typically upbeat rocker rejoicing in the title Something in Your Mouth — a song about a “naughty woman” addicted to sucking her thumb.
While acts such as AC/DC or Kid Rock can carry off these kind of puerile double entendres, there was something rather leaden and prosaic about the singer Chad Kroeger’s delivery that left more of a bad taste than anything else in the mouth. His bumptious, self-regarding manner became more intrusive as the show went on, and in particular his interminable running in-joke about the band’s part-time guitarist and keyboard player “Timmy” was not remotely funny.
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They rolled out some big hits, but not as many certified bankers as you might have expected from a band at this stage of the game. Rockstar — the one from the sofa commercial — was performed on acoustic guitars, with the band sitting on stools (not a sofa) at the end of a walkway extending into the crowd. How You Remind Me, with its distinctive soft-loud dynamic and high-low melody line, pushed the buttons with a dependable touch. But other numbers veered from the fiercely misogynistic Figured You Out to the touchy-feely luvvie-fest of If Everyone Cared, with a wildly uncertain touch.
A group of stage hands, introduced by Kroeger as if they were contestants in the Gladiators TV game show, came on and proceeded to fire piles of rolled-up T-shirts into the crowd from hand-held launchers. A cool stunt, but — like everything else about this show — overplayed.