(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sun 8 February 2026 18:30, UK
In a world full of larger-than-life rock stars, we can all hope to be people like Dave Grohl if we hit the big time.
Grohl might be one of the greatest frontmen to come along in the past 30 years of music, and yet his greatest appeal is being effortlessly human every single time he gets up onstage. He was more than happy to be the one person having the most fun at every single Foo Fighters show, but he figured that there was no way that he could touch what his true idols were used to doing.
Then again, Grohl wasn’t one to put too many people on a pedestal that often. He still sings every single night that his heroes are all ordinary, and when you listen to a lot of the songs in his record collection, you can hear why. Everyone from Ian MacKaye from Fugazi to Neil Peart from Rush tried to downplay the spotlight that was on them, and whenever Grohl worked with someone, it was easier to see them as people underneath all of the window dressing.
Paul McCartney might be too talented for words by many people’s definition, but when he walked into the studio with the surviving members of Nirvana, Grohl showed everyone that even someone like him was still human. All musicians end up speaking the same language after a while, but even if there are only a few chords that someone can choose from for a pop song, Grohl was drawn to people who were making something different.
From praising Kyuss back in his Nirvana days to getting up onstage with boygenius in his later years, Grohl wanted to hear anything that excited him the same way that he was excited by his old stack of records before he even joined a band. But even by the standards of rock and roll, nothing that David Bowie ever did was perceived as normal when he first crashlanded on Earth with ‘Space Oddity’.
While Major Tom gave everyone a look at more experimental pop music, almost anything that Bowie touched turned pop music inside out. An album like Let’s Dance might be the closest that he ever came to being a straight-ahead pop star, but throughout his glam years, his Berlin trilogy, and the amount of time he spent paying tribute to other genres like drum and bass and Philly soul, Bowie seemed to have a superpower to master nearly any genre that he was interested in.
Grohl was definitely most comfortable playing rock and roll, but hearing Bowie for the first time made him feel like he was listening to someone from another planet, saying, “He was just in his universe. Not just musically. His aesthetic. His personality. A lot of the rock and roll I was listening to at the time was made by people that seemed human. Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I loved Crosby, Stills and Nash. The Beatles seemed like normal human beings. David Bowie did not. He seemed like an alien.”
Not many people understood everything that Bowie was doing, but that daringness to try something new was wildly exciting for Grohl when he was growing up. He may have found his niche playing rock and roll with Foo Fighters, but even doing something as strange as making an album of all acoustic songs on the back half of In Your Honor probably wouldn’t have happened if Bowie didn’t give him permission to think outside the confines of “normal” rock and roll.
But even when Grohl saw Bowie performing live, he still could see someone being themselves whenever they had the spotlight. ‘The Starman’ was certainly comfortable in his own skin during every performance, but he was still in tune with the kind of music that existed far beyond our galaxy.