Foo Fighters Recap

“25 years of music, you cool with that?”

No surprise, they were.

“I gotta say thank you for coming back for the rock show tonight, so right now I’m about to give you some noisy [expletive]!”

Welsh rockers The Joy Formidable joined the Foo Fighters on tour to open the show with an album celebration of their own. They released ‘AAARTH’ in late September, bringing a “colourful, mystical” collage of music recorded in a mobile studio that traveled all the way from their native Wales to as far as Arizona.

Foo Fighters built suspense from the very start, strumming the first chords of the show before anyone even took the stage. Grohl’s bandmates were given no respite, with the vocalists holding the same note for 30 seconds before rolling into ‘Run’, the title track of Concrete and Gold and a song he wrote six months into that so-called “hiatus” a few years back.

The frontman deferred vocal duty to drummer Taylor Hawkins, familiar with Canadian shows after drumming for Alanis Morissette in the 1990’s, for ‘Sunday Rain’ after a three-minute elevated drum solo above the floor crowd. Hawkins would jump on vocals again later in the show for Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’, with Grohl taking up his former Nirvana role at drums.

The crowd favourite ‘Everlong’ led into a four-song encore that ended with one final yell from Grohl and cheers from the Rogers Place crowd with ‘Best of You’, a triumphant finish to a night that the Foo Faithful had to wait an extra 50 days for. But you know what the say, the best things are worth it.