(Credits: Andrew Stuart)
Fri 17 April 2026 18:00, UK
Dave Grohl didn’t always want to make music because he was looking for a hit.
The greatest rock and roll artists of all time are the ones who are in it for life, and even if he wasn’t going to see a dime for any of the massive hits that he made ever again, there’s a certain drive that forces the greatest songwriters to their instruments every time they play. But even if Grohl had some genuine classics under his belt, he felt that the greatest characters in rock history had a certain way of carrying themselves better than anyone else.
And when you go through some of his favourite bands, you can tell what he’s talking about. Grohl has said that he felt Queens of the Stone Age were one of the finest bands in the world, and when you look at every other rock and roll outfit working today, Josh Homme has always been great at balancing the gnarly guitar riffs with some genuine swagger that not everyone seems to have these days.
There are certainly bands like Arctic Monkeys that follow in their footsteps, but even Grohl needed something heavier when he first started. He came from the world of punk long before he was fronting Foo Fighters, and even though The Clash and Ramones left an impression on him, no one could touch the kind of hallowed ground that Lemmy seemed to walk on every single time he made a new song.
Despite never having the same kind of hits as the bands he inspired, Lemmy was the one who lit a fire in everyone who was born to break the rules. There are plenty of subgenres of hard rock and metal that wouldn’t have existed without him, and while he said that he was a rock and roller before anything else, Grohl couldn’t deny that the Motorhead frontman was the epitome of what a rock and roll star should be.
There might be some people who try to flaunt their rock star status, but Grohl would trade all of them to be the kind of musician that Lemmy is, saying, “Fuck all of those that survived the 1960s, flying around on Lear jets and living up to their gunslinger reputation as they fuck supermodels in the more expensive hotel in Paris. More than any other musician, Lemmy is the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
That’s high praise, but compared to every other rock and roll star, Lemmy could live up to everyone’s expectations in his prime. Even for someone who drank Jack and Coke every single day of his life, there was never a day that went by that he was too drunk to play or falling over trying to make every song sound right. He knew his role as a rock and roll troubadour before anything else, and nothing was ever going to slow him down.
But maybe the biggest lesson that Lemmy taught Grohl was that it was fine to have a heart underneath that tough exterior. Being one of the most legendary rock and roll pirates alive, you wouldn’t take Lemmy to be the sentimental type, but the fact that he was sympathetic towards Grohl after losing Kurt Cobain was about more than being the typical nice guy at the end of the bar.
He was one of the few who genuinely understood that rock and roll was about being brothers in arms to a certain degree, and even if that meant having to deal with a few hotshots now and again, Lemmy was willing to do whatever he could to get the next record done. And while death did eventually come for him way too young, here’s hoping that he’s still kicking as much ass and taking as many names in the afterlife as he did here.
