(Credits: Far Out / Raphael Pour-Hashemi)
Sun 16 November 2025 1:00, UK
There’s a certain magic that happens whenever Dave Grohl kicks off any Foo Fighters show.
Although they have graduated to some of the biggest arenas that anyone has ever played, rarely has anyone managed to make a venue like Wembley Stadium seem like a sweaty club from the minute that they get onstage. What Grohl was doing had to have a sense of community still, and that means never forgetting all of those gigs where you came from before you had any money to your name.
Even though Grohl is far too big a name to be performing in an intimate coffee shop, he always felt at home when he was first on the road with the band Scream. A lot of people would have been dreaming about the days when they could play Madison Square Garden while tearing through various dive bars, but Grohl only saw an opportunity to have fun. If it meant making dinner out of a couple of gas station corn dogs, it was worth sweating it all out on the road with your best friends.
While there’s a certain romance to that way of thinking, things were going to change drastically once Kurt Cobain got big. He couldn’t handle the pressures of fame, and once he left this Earth, Grohl knew he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life sulking. He needed to move on, and that meant going back to those same sweaty clubs and trying to make a name for himself outside of ‘that one guy from Nirvana’.
But there are only a few bands that had an upward trajectory like Foo Fighters. There was a certain energy in the air whenever they performed, but once they started to blow up, they also had to go through all their dirty laundry. They were hardly a band when the album started gaining traction, and once they had a stable lineup, it’s not like everyone was meant to last, especially in the late 1990s, when one member would be gone every few months.
Given where the band was on the rock food chain, it must have felt good being the ratty punks at every festival they played. Oasis may have been one of the biggest names in music around the late 1990s, but right under them on festival bills would be Grohl chewing gum throughout the set and trying to prove to everyone that they wouldn’t forget them by the time that their set was over.
Grohl knew how lucky he was to get on that stage whenever he toured festivals, but the energy that he brought came from him being disheartened by his heroes watching Monsters of Rock 1988, saying, “It was this fucking horrible…thing, with The Scorpions and Van Halen playing to about 30,000 people. I couldn’t understand how music could translate to such a huge audience and to me it didn’t because I wasn’t receiving any energy from it at all. I felt completely disconnected. In a way, growing up with punk has brainwashed me into thinking that fame is the greatest evil.”
While Van Halen was the furthest thing from punk rock by that point, that shouldn’t really get them off the hook for giving a lousy performance. Nothing that Eddie ever played was necessarily going to be subpar, but when the rest of the audience can sense that the band is going through the motions, how is the group supposed to expect the crowd to give them more energy?
If we look beyond his own punk rock ethos, giving 110% every single time he played wasn’t something that Grohl simply aspired to. He wanted to blow the living daylights out of every venue, and that kind of spirit is the same kind of attitude that connected everyone from Eddie Vedder to Joe Strummer to Freddie Mercury whenever they got onstage.
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