The Brag

Foo Fighters
Back And Forth And Back Again
By Jonno Seidler

It was the feet that gave out first. Watching the secret Foo Fighters gig at Sydney’s Goat Island, their first set on Australian shores since 2008, my soles were starting to get real sore. It was then that I realised day had turned into night, and the band were still relentlessly powering along. Somewhere down the line, a small promo set had mutated into a monster three-hour marathon. “Three hours and four minutes,” clarifies bassist Nate Mendel when I meet him and bandmate Taylor Hawkins at their hotel a few days later. “That was actually the longest set we’ve ever played.” Their set the next night, at Sydney Uni’s Manning Bar, lasted for roughly the same amount of time – so how the hell do they do it? Seven albums and 16 years in, The Foos are certainly not young guns anymore. Blonde drumming dynamo Hawkins likes to compare the band’s relentless performance regime to a workout: “It’s turning into a bit of a macho thing. You know, endurance. It’s sort of like getting in shape and going to the gym, seeing how far you can push yourself,” he laughs. “You definitely reach a point where you start losing some of your facilities. But also you start breaking through walls – mental as well as physical.”

The training has certainly paid off; Foo Fighters are back in a big motherfucking way this year. This week they release their new album Wasting Light, and in a few months their first feature documentary Back & Forth comes out, helmed by Oscar-winning director James Moll. After that, they’re returning to Australia to blow the roof off what frontman Dave Grohl affectionately labels our “super mega domes or whatever the fuck they’re called.”

Back & Forth illustrates that downtime is not a luxury the Foo Fighters have had a lot of in their careers. It’s a revelatory gem, as Moll probes each band member to find out just how intense it is being part of one of the world’s biggest rock and roll acts. “We’d do these crazy interviews in front of the camera that would last a really long time, and he’d just break us down to talk about things that normally we can skate over,” says Hawkins, whose London overdose in 2001 is discussed candidly for the first time, as well as his clashes with Grohl, when the frontman left the band to drum for Queens Of The Stone Age on Songs For The Deaf. “You’d give him [Moll] diplomatic answers and stuff, but he wouldn’t let you get away with it.” Mendel, whose former band Sunny Day Real Estate features heavily when the film focuses on the early days of the group, agrees. “Instead of getting ‘What was it like to record with Butch Vig?’ it’s ‘How did you feel when William [Goldsmith] left the band?’” Although Hawkins admits he finds it uncomfortable to watch, he concedes that, “The best documentaries are the ones where they get under the skin. Unfortunately, it was our skin this time.”

But before the new film comes the new album. Wasting Light is important for a number of reasons, not in the least because it marks the recording debut of the newly minted Foo Fighters five-piece. Original guitarist Pat Smear, ex-Germs and Nirvana, is back in the saddle after almost a decade, bringing the distortion and madness that defined the band’s earliest releases. “I’m not an outgoing person,” says Mendel, “so I do like having Pat on my left side, because he’s doing his thing and everybody’s looking at him and I can just relax and play music.”

Produced by Butch Vig, of Nevermind fame, the album was recorded entirely in Grohl’s Virginia garage – on tape. It’s a move that allowed the band’s approach to be more elastic (“I’m writing stuff on the fly now, and I like it way better,” says Mendel), and shifted the emphasis away from studio gloss and back towards what made them love playing in the first place. With a bipolar history of going from the basement to the studio and back again, scrapping entire albums (One By One) and changing line-ups, the only thing Foo Fighters like to keep consistent is the quality of their output. “Obviously you want to have an interesting story for the record and the fans,” says Mendel, “but you also want to keep the band interested and keep everyone on their toes. It’s constructed in a way, ‘How do we make it better and interesting and different?’”

It certainly shows; new songs like ‘Rope’ and ‘White Limo’ are some of the most relentlessly hard-hitting tunes the band has cut since the ‘90s. Their renewed approach also comes off the back of a saner touring schedule, to coincide with the fact that most Foos are now also fathers. “We used to do four week, five week tours of Europe. Twice,” says Hawkins. “Now we do maximum two or three weeks and then spend some time at home. It seems to work better for us, as people.” They’re also playing more intimate club gigs than ever before, “which is great, because it means we’ll be really fuckin’ hittin’ hard when we get to the stadiums.” The band now also rehearses for a week without Grohl, to get themselves super tight before heading out on the road. “We drilled ourselves without him, which meant he could sort of walk in to a readymade band. It wasn’t intended that way, it just sort of happened.” So look out for Foo Fighters, they’re well-oiled and ready to beat their previous record. Just make sure you stretch out those calves before you hit the venue.

What: Wasting Light is out April 8, through Sony; Back & Forth is coming soon.