While the footballers of England and Denmark were trotting tediously around Frankfurt’s Waldstadion, there was at least one European stadium where everyone was having the time of their lives. Part of football’s appeal is of course its capriciousness, the matched possibilities of a dazzling spectacular or a damp squib. Give me the reliable airpunching bedlam of a Foo Fighters concert every time.
For almost 30 years, it’s been pretty clear what band leader Dave Grohl is going to do when he stands up in front of a large crowd. Never mind the fame-hating misery of his long distant formative success in Nirvana. Now he will behave convincingly like the person who is having the best time of all among 80,000 others. He will scream endlessly, less like the controlled fury of a heavy metal singer and more like a schoolboy on his first rollercoaster. He will refer to everybody, all evening, as “motherfuckers”, and somehow make it sound affectionate. And since his group became the biggest hard rock band in the world, he will do all this for three hours a night.
Now 55, as time has gone on it must have become harder to maintain this state of unbridled joy, at least off stage. Last summer the eleventh Foo Fighters album, But Here We Are, was partly informed by the deaths of their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, and Grohl’s mother Virginia, both in 2022. Its songs have their joyful moments, but there’s an emotional heaviness throughout as well, especially evident on the 10-minute epic The Teacher – an encore here.
Hawkins was probably the only man who looked like he was having more fun than the frontman at their shows. His oversized absence was treated sensitively here. Grohl performed the song Under You, which is about that loss, solo on acoustic guitar. Thousands of phone torches came out for the 1999 ballad Aurora, dedicated to the members of the Hawkins family in the audience. At the close, the late drummer’s teenage son Oliver Shane Hawkins was brought on to drum on I’ll Stick Around.
All of this could have felt intimidating for the new man at the kit, Josh Freese, a long time friend of the band who didn’t drum on the latest album (that was Grohl) but was unveiled in a prank video last year. In fact, during the band introductions midway through, he looked moved to receive the longest welcoming applause of all.
Aside from the emotions on display, as stadium shows go, this was less spectacular than some. On the longest day of the year, Grohl joked about all the expensive lighting “going to waste”. There was no complicated stage architecture – just a giant “FF” logo and the wall of monumental guitars provided by Grohl, Chris Shiflett and Nirvana’s former touring member Pat Smear.
Perhaps the predictability was the point. Grohl is a lifelong believer in the power of pure, unadorned rock and roll. That’s what has held his band together over the decades. After so long in their company, it’s easy to be convinced that nothing else matters.
22 June, London Stadium; 25 June, Principality Stadium Cardiff; 27 June, Villa Park Birmingham
