"We're from cattle country, so I've burned a horseshoe shape on one. "Gibson send me unfinished guitars and I go to work on them," he explains. When Ryan comes offstage from a night of abusing guitars, he likes to… abuse more guitars. "They take a lot of flak from people who've never done f*ck-all in their lives," he says. Jaws dropped when it emerged that Nickelback's red-blooded odes to sex, cars and having sex in cars had struck a chord with Coldplay's fair trade frontman. The origins of Nickelback were more prosaic, with the name occuring to bassist Mike Kroeger as he toiled in Starbucks, repeating the same mantra as he handed customers their change: "here's your nickel back". 'The Doors' was inspired by a William Blake poem. 'The Beatles' came to John Lennon in a dream. "I think they're great." Chris Martin of ColdplayĨ. "I dreamed it - I'll be onstage and have a heart attack, and the crowd will think it's part of the show. "I will die on my 40th birthday," he told Playboy. We gave him $5000 just for that suggestion!" Was it really worth five grand? The killer hook in How You Remind Me - when the band drop out and Chad bellows 'for handing you a heart worth breaking!' - was the idea of drum tech Andrew Mawhinney.Ĭhad reflects: "He goes, 'you guys should do a big stop right at the last chorus'. "I will die on my 40th birthday." Chad Kroeger "I honestly think if Nickelback hadn't worked out, I'd be in jail, on a charge of grand theft auto or trafficking," he says. James was the guy behind those songs and those rhythms as well."Ĭhad's delinquent lyrics are a fair reflection of his juvenile rap sheet, whose highlights include truancy, trespassing and the theft of a small truck. In the perennial 'Hammett vs Hetfield' debate, he's firmly in the big fella's camp: "I was never that into Kirk's playing. Ryan Peake's bulldozer riffs can be attributed to his first tab books - Metallica's Master Of Puppets and Ride The Lightning.