Live Review: Foo Fighters

Last time I saw Foo Fighters, I was 21. I was among jubilant peers. We were filthy and sweaty. We pogoed ecstatically.

The band showed vague, fleeting hints of the stadium-rock band it would become, but they still played Weenie Beenie. Everyone seems to have aged at double the rate I have, because last night I stood in an excruciatingly slow beer queue at Coopers Stadium among a litany of blokes in sensible jeans and wives in outfits purchased for 20th high-school reunions. Who were these people?! Were they hoping for Weenie Beenie? Did they understand Grohl’s tenuous connection to Trini Lopez? Had they even heard of The Germs?

None of that matters, of course; I’m being elitist. Punks and music nerds aren’t the Foo Fighters fans Dave is looking for.

Poor Davey has copped quite a lot of shit on this tour - mostly variations on the “bland corporate rock sell-out” theme, from the kinds of people who rhapsodised Mogwai last week (by the way: Mogwai were fucking awesome). But why can’t cerebral, artful post-rock exist cheerily alongside big dumb guitar rock? Big dumb guitar rock is definitely what the Foos do. Their familiar pop-rock nuggets were augmented with enormous intros, or gargantuan outros, or overly-protracted middle-eight breakdowns. Some songs were blighted by all three.

Twenty-five thousand punters nonetheless lapped that shit right up! An eight-minute version of Monkey Wrench simply meant fewer unfamiliar songs for them to sit through while waiting for the MMM staples, like Learn To Fly, These Days, Times Like These and Best Of You, that were evenly dispersed through the set. The visuals were great, the band was loud. Wind compromised the PA sound now and then.

Things got interesting when the band vanished and reappeared on a small, circular stage half-way down a catwalk that stretched way out into the crowd. This second stage rotated to face those in the east and west stands front-on. Now, you can either dismiss this gimmick as indulgent, egotistical wankery or enjoy it as an earnest attempt at intimacy with people sat farther back in the stadium. The Foos looked great squished into a tiny space (as if still in their long-gone club days) and proceeded to play stuff they would have jammed on as teenagers: Kiss’ Detroit Rock City, Stay With Me by The Faces, and an extremely raunchy version of AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock - proof positive that Grohl knows exactly the type of person buying his records in 2015. Less predictable was his take on the Queen/Bowie hit Under Pressure, during which the frontman duetted with drummer Taylor Hawkins.

So yeah, the Foo Fighters are not even remotely indie or punk or grunge or any other vague descriptor. They still occasionally use genuinely interesting syncopation and chord choices that are a million miles beyond, say, entirely incidental tour supports Rise Against, but they also still write stuff that sounds frighteningly close to the Goo Goo Dolls.

The point is that Dave (and Krist, and Kurt, for that matter) grew up on Kiss, and Queen, and Aerosmith, and The Knack. They imitated their idols until they discovered, and joined, the US underground. Nirvana’s transcending that scene was directly responsible for white kids like me from far-flung outback towns having access to The Raincoats, or The Vaselines, or Earth - or any number of bands “cooler” than the Foo Fighters. And based on the theatrics, the volume, the lights and the no-thought-required big dumb guitar rock of the Sonic Highways tour, I’d say Grohl’s belief in restarting that discovery cycle is genuine.