It’s high noon on a blazing April day, which is the ideal time to be sitting in an Irish pub aboard a cruise ship the size of a small asteroid. The bar is called O’Sheehan’s – pronounced “oceans” – and it’s located deep within the belly of the boat, just above the teppanyaki joint, the sake bar and the lustrous duty-free shops. This consciousness-altering diorama of infinite seas and Guinness-themed paraphernalia is where I meet Colleen Sullivan, a 46-year-old woman with a beehive of curly red hair and arms encased by plastic wristbands. She wants to tell me how Creed changed her life.

We are both here for Summer of ’99, a weekend-long cruise and concert festival for which Creed – as in the Christian-lite rock band that sold more than 28m albums in the US and yet may be the most widely disdained group in modern times – are reuniting for the first time in 12 years. Roughly 2,400 other Creed fans are along for the round trip from Miami to the Bahamas, and the rest of the bill is occupied by the dregs of turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock stardom. Buckcherry are here. So are Vertical Horizon, Fuel and 3 Doors Down, who haven’t released an album since 2016.

To celebrate, Sixthman, the booking agency responsible for this and many other cruises, has thoroughly Creedified every element of the ship. The band’s logo is printed on the napkins and scripted across the blackjack felt. The TV screens at the bar are tuned to a near-constant loop of Creed’s performance at Woodstock ’99. The onboard library has been converted to a merch store selling Creed hoodies and shot glasses. When I turn on the closed-circuit television in my cabin, a channel called New Movies plays Scream 3 and Can’t Hardly Wait. Sixthman pulled similar stunts with Train’s Sail Across the Sun cruise and Kid Rock’s notoriously debauched Chillin’ the Most cruise – the Kid Rock cruise also took place on the vessel I’m on, the Norwegian Pearl. The idea is to teleport a captive audience back into the dirtbags they once embodied and to a simpler time, when Scott Stapp, Creed’s mercurial lead singer, controlled the universe.

Sullivan tells me that her relationship with Creed overlaps with her sobriety story. She first became a fan of the band in the late 1990s, when Higher and With Arms Wide Open were soaring up the charts. Then Sullivan started using, and her appreciation for the divine proportions of those songs faded in service of more corporeal needs. Years later, after Creed broke up and Sullivan got clean, she returned to the music and discovered a dogma of her own: maybe she had been put on Earth to love Stapp – and Creed – harder, and with more urgency, than anyone else in the world.