Foo Fighters
Everything or Nothing At All tour
Hampden Park, Glasgow
You may have heard of a little tour, called Eras by Taylor Swift, that's doing the rounds at the moment. It called into Murrayfield the other weekend, causing some to worry that Glasgow might be losing its music capital crown to Edinburgh. Last night, at a sun-soaked Hampden Park, the Foo Fighters reclaimed Glasgow's place as Scotland's rightful rock 'n' roll epicentre as Dave Grohl joked that the band had christened their show the Errors tour.
The national stadium doesn't have a roof but if it had Grohl and his gang would have blown the bloody thing off as they kicked off with All My Life, and tore into a set with songs from across their 30-year history.
Grohl is a true showman and has made the journey from a young hardcore punk playing tiny shoebox venues to the perfect stadium frontman. 'I've got a question, who loves rock n roll?' he asks the crowd, before telling them that he loves f"""""" rock n roll. He manages, somehow, to craft moments of intimacy with a sold-out Hampden, joking that the sing-a-long crowd are stealing his line in The Pretender.
Grohl introduces his band, and they all do a turn, which includes Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones and Whip It by Devo – the new drummer Josh Freese was in Devo for, Grohl says, 25 years. And that's all good – but keyboardist Rami Jeffee takes it a stage further when he leads the crowd in massed rendition of Flower of Scotland.
He tells the crowd that they have played in this city more than a few times, from the Barrowland to T in the Park, and treats the crowd to Skin and Bones, which he says he wrote back stage at T.
Later, he says he's brought his entire family with him as they wanted to see Scotland and brings his daughter Violet on stage to duet with him on a new song Show Me How.
The band clearly love what they do – there is no going through the motions – and we get only the third ever live performance of a new song Unconditional.
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They end with Best of You, and encore with The Teacher from their 11th album, But Here We Are, dedicated to Grohl's mother who passed away in 2022.
Finally, after more than two and half hours of what Grohl calls his rock 'n' roll show, they end with an explosive Everlong, as he sups from his vocal lotion, a bottle of Buckfast.
Taylor Swift may be able to fill Murrayfield but will she still enjoy playing as much as Dave Grohl and his bandmates in 30 years' time? And will we still thrill to them? Maybe, maybe not. But as Grohl says: "We are too old to do anything else now so if you keep coming to see us, we'll keep coming back. Actually, we'll keep coming back anyway. It's what we do."
Amen to that.
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