“IT WAS A PUNK ROCK SHOW. I WAS THIRTEEN. IT WAS RAW AND IT WAS LOUD. PEOPLE WERE BEATING THE SH*T OUT OF EACH OTHER, THERE WAS SPIT AND PUKE AND GLASS FLYING EVERYWHERE, AND I THOUGHT, THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!”
Early last year, when the world stopped, so did Dave Grohl’s plans for celebrating 25 years of Foo Fighters. “We had finished all of our work with our album,” he says. “We had mixed it and mastered it and we had the artwork and everything was ready to go. And then it got taken away.”
But now, at last, that album, Medicine At Midnight, is released, and as Grohl speaks to Total Guitar from his home in Los Angeles, he’s in typically ebullient mood as he hails it as a radical departure for the band, inspired by 80s classics by Bowie and the Stones.
He also promises: “There’s still a few things that will be coming in the next few months that kind of celebrate that 25th anniversary.” And he adds, with a note of humility uncommon among rock’s major players: “At the end of the day, I’m incredibly shocked and proud that we lasted this long.”
In an hour-long conversation, Grohl traces his journey from teenage punk rock drummer to stadium rock superstar. But he begins in the here and now, with what he describes, only half-jokingly, as “a disco record...”
Medicine At Midnightis a very different sounding Foo Fighters album. What was the thinking behind it?
Knowing that this would be our 25th anniversary and this would be our tenth album, we sort of felt obligated to stretch a little bit. There were different directions we could go. We could make a beautiful, sleepy fireside acoustic record, or we could make a really noisy, chaotic punk rock-sounding record. We’ve done everything in between. But the one thing we haven’t done yet is make a party album.
Meaning what, exactly?
I thought about some of my favourite albums from the 80s, which were rock bands that made music that you could dance to. Whether it was The Rolling Stones’ , or David Bowie’s or , there were these really heavy grooves that I loved. A lot of
