(Credits: Far Out / Raphael Pour-Hashemi)
Mon 9 February 2026 2:00, UK
Being a drummer provides a certain sense of security; situated at the back of the stage, protected from potential stage invaders and thrown bottles by a surrounding kit. It takes a special kind of talent, then, to go from behind the drums to the front of a stage, but Dave Grohl has certainly managed to pull off that near-impossible task with Foo Fighters.
Grohl’s talents have always been rather multi-faceted, going right back to his rock-obsessed teenage years in Washington, DC, but when he joined the ranks of Nirvana, he seemed quite content to resign himself exclusively to percussion. After all, there was no use in trying to compete with the songwriting mastery, nor the artistic vision, of Kurt Cobain.
When Cobain met his tragic end in 1994, then, you could have forgiven Grohl for abandoning the music industry entirely. To make the leap from grunge drummer to arena rock frontman is a career change-up that nobody else has ever really pulled off, certainly not as successfully as the Foo Fighters frontman anyway. In fact, there are a few drummers who successfully make the move to frontman, regardless of genre.
One of perhaps the only examples that springs to mind is of the former Genesis drummer turned 1980s pop sensation, Phil Collins. However, when that comparison was drawn between Collins and Grohl during a 1995 interview for the Summersault Festival programme in 1995, the former Nirvana drummer was outraged. “[An affinity] with Phil Collins? None whatsoever, thank you,” he exclaimed.
Given Grohl’s roots in the underground sounds of punk and grunge rebellion, it is no surprise that he was filled with disgust at the mention of mainstream archetype Phil Collins. In fact, he was so disgusted that he searched desperately for another example, eventually settling for The Police’s drummer. “Stuart Copeland did it,” he declared. “Stuart Copeland did the Klark Kent record, you ever heard that record?”
“It’s fucking an amazing record,” he went on, heaping praise onto Copeland’s 1980 solo debut, while expertly shifting the conversation away from the Genesis drummer. “The reason you’ve never heard it is because he made this record, he didn’t put his name on it, so it’s like a totally anonymous thing.”
He added. “It’s a fucking amazing record, he plays all the instruments… I don’t know whether he played any shows.”
“But don’t mention Phil Collins,” Grohl then concluded, following his diversion to Copeland’s fledgling solo career.
Not to side with the budding young journalist who seemed to offend Grohl so greatly, but it is certainly difficult to think of any other drummer who was as successful both in their original groups and as solo artists than Collins and Grohl. Copeland, after all, is still probably best known for his Police work rather than that nameless 1980 record.
Then again, comparing the percussionist who brought grunge to the masses, and went on to master the art of arena rock only a few years later, to the drummer who dominated the pop charts of the 1980s and played one pretty disastrous gig with Led Zeppelin – coincidentally Grohl’s favourite band – is quite a stretch. It is no wonder that Grohl would rather avoid that particular comparison.
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