FOO FIGHTERS

Head Foo Fighter, singer and guitarist, Dave Grohl got his license a year later than he should have and reckons that 12 months wait was the longest year of his life. When he did get his license his choice of vehicles was somewhat limited.

“Whatever my mum was driving.” he laughs “I didn’t get my own car until I was like 23, until we stopped touring for (Nirvana’s) Nevermind.”

These days someone else does the driving and you’ll probably get no complaints from Grohl. The Foo Fighters don’t muck around with the touring thing. The jaunt on the back of the Colour and The Shape album started in May and ran straight through until December with 3 whips around the U.S., 3 European tours and a trip to Japan. Grohl reckons the band will have seen about a year and a half’s worth of departure lounges before their commitments are completed. But although he feels the more time that’s spent on the road the lesser the chance of some Spinal Tap type incident occurring the band seem to have had their moments on the tour.

“Taking a Lear Jet would that be like Spinal Tap?” he asks before indulging in a bit of self correction before this writer can respond. “No, that would be very not like Spinal Tap.” he chuckles. “I can’t really think of much. We’ve been asked to open up for Black Sabbath. I’m sure Spinal Tap would do that.

We’re going to pay to play that show.” he jokes.

A greater, more enthusiastic lover of the Rock than Dave Grohl would be damn hard to find though for some reason he has yet to pick up the Bonfire boxed set by his beloved AC/DC. He reckons The Prodigy are the greatest live “rock” act he’s ever seen and raves about German techno and highly inflammable psychos, Rammstein. On another level he still gets a kick out of meeting his old heroes like Clifford, the singer from SST act, Blast and excitedly mentions that Chuck Dukowski from Black Flag once came to see the Foos in Minnaepolis.

“I’d love to met (Flag’s) Greg Ginn because he’s one of my guitar heroes. I’ve heard that he’s really strange, always stoned. But the guy’s amazing. I read an article recently where he was just so down on the whole situation like he just hated the state of music today. He was still very punk rock and very anti-establishment.”

Roughly mid way through the Foo’s current tour, guitarist, Pat Smear, one half of the Foo’s punk rock title belt holders thanks to his time in L.A’s legendary, Germs and a stint in latter day Nirvana signed himself out of the band. 

“He really didn’t like touring as much as the rest of us did.” explains Grohl. “He said look, I want to stay at home and I want to do some other things. We said OK, that’s fine and we found Franz. We don’t really miss Pat – but of course we miss Pat because he’s a friend and everything – but the band is better than we’ve ever been. It sounds better and it feels better and it’s tighter. My goal has always been to be as powerful live as The Bad Brains, the band that were from Washington DC that were totally amazing and we’re not that close yet but we’re getting there. But of course we miss him in spirit but the band sounds a thousand times better than we ever have so that’s kind of nice.

We knew for the longest time that Pat was going to leave, before the album even came out.”

Can Grohl see the day when the Foos might be a trio?

“No, actually you know what? We considered that when Pat left the band. We talked about being a three piece and I mean, I don’t really think …I don’t know. That’s a good question. It’s not an impossibility but at the same time I don’t want it to happen. At this point we do whatever we can do to keep the band moving and by having someone leave…it’s sad and you have to reassess and re-evaluate and decide whether you want to stop or carry on and every time something like that happens we decide to carry on because we love being in the band too much. We joke about it like, I’m going to be the next person to quit you know?

Eventually it’s just going to be Taylor and Franz.”

There’s been talk for some time about further post humous Nirvana releases. In fact last year there were strange reports that Grohl and fellow N bandite, Krist Novoselic were planning on releasing a box of unreleased goodies in the year 2000. It’s all news to Grohl.

“Apparently there’s talk of another release on Geffen of unreleased material. I get asked about that all the time and I’m not entirely sure what it is. As you can see I’m sort of out of the loop. When something really starts to happen then Krist and I usually get the call and then say, OK, this is what’s going on and we either say yes or we say no and I haven’t been contacted about anything really.”

In any event Grohl seems comfortable that the Foo Fighters are now seen in their own light and on their own terms rather than operating in the shadow of the N band.

“I think so. But I don’t know really, I can never tell. I don’t really worry about it so I’m not sure but to me it seems like it’s sort of a thing of the past. Well, it is in the past but that’s one of the reasons we started this band was just so that we could get on with things and not dwell on what we’ve already done and try to accomplish something new, all of us.”

“I still think there’s still people that will always see me as the guy that played drums in Nirvana which is OK because I did” he laughs. “It’s not really that big of a deal. But if people enjoy the music it doesn’t matter whether I was in, you know, Fleetwood Mac or f..king Black Flag. If people come out to see the band and they like it then they like it and that’s great and that makes me happy.”

OK but let’s just not get too carried away picking names out of the air…

MURRAY ENGLEHEART