Why foo fighters hate coldplay

It was a big one. Nevermind sold and sold and sold, pushing the band into the mainstream, sudden success due largely to the album's killer opening track, the seething, wrathful "Smells Like Teen Spirit". That opened with Grohl's unforgettable salvo on the drums, one you couldn't ever hear without miming sticks: bup-BAD-umph, bup-BAD-umph… Playing it live, Grohl used to hunch over his drums to such a degree, leaning into the song, that his forehead almost rested on the snare.

Because there's no way this is gonna last. This will never last. There is footage from the MTV awards in that shows Grohl, loose limbed and giggly, messing about with bandmate Novoselic in an interview. He munches a snack and makes jokes. Interviewed at the following year's awards, in a backstage room at the Gibson Amphitheatre, some serious lassitude has set in. Grohl complains of a "schmooze or lose" culture in music.

Beside him, Novoselic suggests that, by accepting money and support from big corporations, Nirvana have lost something essential.

At the next awards, in , Grohl and Novoselic are shown on their own. It has become, unquestionably, the thing Grohl is asked about most.

Early on he developed stock answers — about Kurt being unable to cope with the complications of fame, about the inspiration he imparted — and Grohl has stuck to them fairly rigidly ever since.

I'd assumed that Cobain would be the last subject he'd want to discuss, and I'm surprised, in the dressing room, when he starts talking about his friend unprompted. He tells a story about the days when the band were recording Nevermind , and Cobain went to great efforts to steal a reel from a novelty album by Evel Knievel, the 70s stuntman, which had been recorded in the same Los Angeles studio.

Grohl is in a nostalgic mood, perhaps, because it was 20 years ago to the month that his band recorded Nevermind , in that studio up the road. Only this morning Grohl had finalised a deal to buy the old analogue mixing desk on which the album was made. I went to pick it up this morning and almost started bawling. He tells another story. Novoselic was in California recently to play a couple of songs with Foo Fighters, a one-off gig.

Grohl, Novoselic and Pat Smears a current Foo and former guitarist with Nirvana did a run-through of the set list. After that, they found themselves alone, with time to kill. Pat's on guitar. I'm on drums," says Grohl and ridiculously, at this point, my heart starts to thump. I mean, that's something I've never considered before. I was, like [queasily], ' OK. I haven't played that drum beat in 17 years.

Grohl wants to tell a joke — his instinct is to defuse any heaviness — and I want to ask a question. Did anybody sing? Grohl is singing on the MTV stage. The stage is… interesting looking. Objects that resemble booms from a boat, made of glass, hang from above, while below parts of the floor have been planted with desert island-like shrubbery.

The aesthetic probably has a name, and that name is probably something awful like "decadent shipwreck", but I prefer the judgment of Grohl's two-year-old daughter, who toured the set and was prompted to produce her longest sentence yet: "Daddy's circus is so pretty. Grohl told me this just before our interview was interrupted, a palm slammed on the door and the singer informed he was needed on set.

Grohl was up and out and on to the stage within half a minute, during which time I found myself walking as if a competition winner, or the cameraman for a soft drink advert in his wake along corridors, out across tarmac crisscrossed by technicians, then up some steps and through a curtain to the bright lights where the other Foos were already warming up and a roadie was holding out Grohl's guitar.

I was almost beyond the drum kit before recalling that no, no, I wasn't a rock musician, quickly backtracking to the wings, and from that vantage, beside a man with a little hose and a pouch of liquid on his back, watering the desert-island shrubbery, I watched the band perform. It was never an option, in , for Grohl or Novoselic to continue without Cobain.

I honestly didn't feel I could do anything wrong because I had nothing left. His only songwriting credit to date had come on a Nirvana B-side, but Grohl the animal drummer, "the jackass" had quietly been writing his own songs, serious ones, and had about enough to put out a record.

No band, yet, but he settled on the name Foo Fighters and released an album with that title in , every instrument on it played by himself. Six albums have followed, including 's There is Nothing Left to Lose , recorded in a celebratory mood once Grohl had settled on a line-up of Foos he actually liked, and which won a best album Grammy. Scant years after the collapse of his prospects — "How could I possibly be considered a songwriter after being in a band with Kurt? Yet Grohl has never quite been able to let drumming go, playing, over the years, in a dizzying number of side projects.

He once told a story about accepting a lift in Coldplay's private plane before realising, minutes into the hours-long flight, "it was all vegetarian food and you couldn't smoke". Last night, Grohl shyly admits, he was out to dinner with Paul McCartney.

Because there's this kind of need for security and stability that doesn't really come with the job, y'know? So you kind of race through this thing, your career, imagining some sort of finishing line — but what will happen when you cross it? No wonder musicians go crazy, or get high. Grohl has anchors, he says, like his family "my foundation" and the band "I rely on them and I love them" , and that has allowed him to get by without other crutches.

But I've watched a lot of my friends continue down that path. Watched them get fucked over by it. These days the Foos' drummer, Taylor Hawkins, is clean. He's a weather-beaten but smiling year-old in shorts and tennis socks, married with a son: disgustingly domesticated. Back in , however, he was a serious heroin user, and on tour that year he overdosed and was admitted to a London hospital. Hawkins didn't die.

After two weeks in a coma he woke up, recovery confirmed when he turned to Grohl and told him as was apparently the band's way to "fuck off". Grohl had been beside his bed for two weeks. Years earlier, aged 18, Grohl had seen a friend take too much coke and suffer a heart attack in a Virginia car park.

Before his death, in , Kurt Cobain had already collapsed in Rome after overdosing on heroin. Grohl, in another country, watched him being wheeled into an ambulance on TV; when he spoke to his friend on the phone he told him: "I don't want you to die.

It must feel that he's had to endure this — a helpless view from the fringes — too often. Because, to me, it felt like music equalled death. I started praying. I've never been to church in my life, and I'm walking back from Taylor's hospital to our hotel every night, praying out loud in the streets of London. I don't even know if I believe in God. But I felt like, y'know, this is just not right, y'know, what kind of God would let this…".

He catches himself doing a voice, a man-to-the-heavens baritone, and barks out a laugh. He waves a fist at the ceiling, mocking himself, diffusing.

Could this instinct to make light of things, I wonder, be what's steered him through? The difference between him and Cobain might only, at root, have been a sense of humour. He thinks about it. No, he decides: it's to do with family. And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I'd go back to Virginia.

And I'd spend the night in the room I grew up in. Like all good and sensible musicians, Bowie was prone to saying no to requests to use his music. But what if someone who is respected in their own field comes to you, saying they want to make a movie about you? Maybe a hugely well-regarded film-maker like Danny Boyle, who has a script by the equally well-regarded Frank Cottrell Boyce.

You still say no. He had no chance. The New Zealand comedy-music duo were longtime Bowie fans, having written the song Bowie in Space years ago, and when they began their own series for US TV, they wrote an episode in which they were to be visited in a dream by Bowie.

And who better to play Bowie than Bowie? Through intermediaries, they approached him. Fair enough, so would we. Through the disappointment I was extremely relieved. As exciting as it is to meet your hero, the relief of not having to meet them is another, quite different and pleasant feeling. Fellas, take a hint. Bowie was a man with a firm appreciation of his own talents, and while he doubtless would have been able to bring suitable villainy to the role of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill — a role eventually taken by Christopher Walken — it was the downsides that turned him off.

Not the prospect of acting opposite Roger Moore, who was 57 and distinctly unactionlike by the time the film was released, but the idea of whether it was the best use of his time. Bowie, famously, learned a great deal from Lindsay Kemp — the dancer, mime artist and choreographer. I taught him the importance of the look — makeup, costume, general stagecraft, performance technique. I gave him books to read and pictures to look at. We talked about kabuki, avant gardists, the world of the music hall, which we were both attracted to.