Dave Grohl had just begun the riff to Foo Fighters’ perennial “Everlong” when calamity struck. “My guitar just died!” he told 50,000 cold, wet, windswept fans, shock in his voice. Not one to let a little thing like broken equipment stop the rock, Grohl took the microphone off its stand and styled it out “like Bono”, dancing and singing around the stage in a convincing pastiche of a star frontman.
His guitar duly fixed, he joined in for the song’s exhilarating crescendo. As a metaphor for where Foo Fighters have found themselves over the past two years, it was almost too on the nose. The death of beloved drummer and rock’n’roll lifeforce Taylor Hawkins in 2022 spun the band, and the wider rock community, off its axis.
But in tragedy has come a certain revitalisation. After a decade or more of producing perfectly serviceable if largely unmemorable stadium-sized rock of negligible stylistic variation, last year’s But Here We Are album was their best in years. The ghost of Hawkins led to Grohl’s most direct and personal lyrics yet: a defiant, triumphant coming-to-terms-with-the-shock “Rescued” sounded like a lost ’90s classic; “you showed me how to grieve/never showed me how to say goodbye” goes album centrepiece “The Teacher”, a dark, 10-minute stop-start epic that began the night’s encore in murky, edgy style.
And live, there has been a refocus, a fine-tuning to what has always been a huge, fun, juggernaut of a show. Even in dismal condit.