With his determination, dedication, energy and wide-ranging talent, one man has taken the Foo Fighters from effectively a solo project to one of the biggest bands in the world. Now, with their new album, they want to make you move your feet.

Words: Dave Everley

GETTY

Fight club: (l-r) Taylor Hawkins, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, Chris  Shiflett, Nate Mendel, Rami Jaffee.

DANNY CLINCH/PRESS

“Taking this shit too seriously can be the death of any band.” 

Dave Grohl

D ave Grohl has many great memories of Lemmy, but there’s one in particular that’s imprinted on his brain.

It was late morning in Los Angeles years ago, and the Foo Fighters frontman was en route to The Rainbow, Lemmy’s Sunset Strip hangout of choice, for an early-doors meeting with the Motörhead mainman. Halfway there, Grohl got a call: could he come to Lemmy’s apartment instead? Sure, said Grohl. After all, he’d never been through those hallowed portals.

 “So I got to the apartment,” says Grohl, laughing, “and I was shocked at how fucking disgusting it was. These aisles of magazines and VHS tapes stacked three to four feet high, Lemmy sitting on the couch, in his black bikini underwear with a spiderweb on them, after just dyeing his hair black, doing a phone interview, with a videogame on pause on the television.”

Lemmy beckoned for Grohl to take a seat on the sofa next to him as he finished the interview. When it was done, Lemmy asked him if he wanted a drink. “It was fucking eleven-fifteen in the morning,” says Grohl. “I said: ‘Sure.’”

And there Grohl sat for the next five hours, on Lemmy’s couch, knocking back Lemmy-sized measures of Jack Daniel’s, with Lemmy in his underpants next to him. They listened to old Dudley Moore tapes and the new Motörhead album, during which the man who wrote and sang it stared into Grohl’s eyes and mouthed every lyric as it came through the television speakers. For a bourbon-fuelled Motörhead fan, this was as good as it gets.

“I will never, ever forget every little detail of that day,” Grohl says now. “Especially not the black underwear with a spiderweb and a black widow spider right where the dick is.”

Jack Daniel’s, Motörhead, spiderweb underpants, it’s a very Lemmy story. But it’s a very Dave Grohl story too. He may lead one of the most successful rock’n’roll bands of the past 25 years, but there’ll always be part of him that will forever be that teenage rock’n’roll fan. For all the record sales, the stadium gigs and the A-list names in his phone – and there are a lot of those – Dave Grohl is still one of us.

Dave Grohl and hero Lemmy in LA in 2003.

It’s 5pm in the UK and 9am in LA when he calls me via Zoom. He’s at home, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt and nursing a coffee. He’s already sorted out breakfast. “I know what it feels like to jump up in front of eighty thousand people and go: ‘Come on, motherfuckers!’” he says. “But I also know what it’s like to hear my alarm and go downstairs and make scrambled eggs and bacon for my kids.”

We ’re here to talk about the Foo Fighters’ yet-tobe-released tenth album, Medicine At Midnight, (rescheduled for February), and how a livewire punk-rock kid from Virginia ended up becoming a rubber-stamped stadium-straddling superstar. But mostly we’re here talk about rock’n’roll.

It ain’t half hot, mum… Grohl cools it at London Stadium, June 2018.