You can see exactly why Prince Harry got on the blower to Dave Grohl and asked him whether Foo Fighters could close the first Invictus Games, the sporting competition for wounded and sick service personnel. The band already have an unofficial anthem in My Hero, which they dedicate tonight to “all the heroes in the audience”. Their other pop-rock hits, meanwhile, chime just as emphatically, whether Walk – about “learning to walk again” – Times Like These, about finding a way to “live”, “give” and “love”, or Learn to Fly, about ...
The Foos are not only the perfect rock act for the event – as opposed to, say, James Blunt and Ellie Goulding, who paint the bill vanilla earlier in the day – but one of the greatest rock acts of our time. It’s not just that they run up and down the stage, crack out the singalong hits like a mass karaoke session and flash those toothy smiles so wide they could light up the Olympic Park themselves. It’s that, despite their stadium stature, they maintain a real sense of spontaneity and punk spirit: see the three free, last-minute live shows they played at intimate UK venues last week. As you might expect after three consecutive gigs, the band seem a bit knackered at first. Grohl’s mighty foghorn is more like a scratchy hyena’s bark; Taylor Hawkins endearingly forgets the words to his song Cold Day in the Sun, filling the space instead with a bemused grin. But they still manage to keep up the hype, charging their poppier tracks with bristling hardcore-punk (at the climax of My Hero) and guitar riffs straight out of the Led Zep rulebook (The Pretender).
There are no sneak peeks of new material from their forthcoming album, Sonic Highways, which will “explore new territory without losing our ‘sound’” – the next stage in Grohl’s mission to absorb guitar music’s cornerstones (metal, punk, classic rock etc) with his giant Foo Fighters mop. Instead, howling Motörhead-indebted ripper White Limo from their last album, 2011’s Wasting Light, is a pleasant change of pace, even if it’s followed by lyrical cheesebomb Arlandria. They bow out with Everlong, still as affecting as it was when it came out nearly 20 years ago. The same could be said of the Foos themselves.
