The artist Dave Grohl claimed to be hopelessly in love with
No matter what he does, Dave Grohl will always be hailed as one of alternative rock’s founding fathers. Due to his work in Nirvana and Foo Fighters, he provided the genre with some of its central tenets and made it a fixture of modern life.
Like his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain, Grohl is a songwriter of rare talent. A lifelong fan of the memorable lyrics, pop melodies and rock energy that The Beatles pioneered, he would hone his compositional talent in these areas while in Nirvana. Their drummer would help them with backing vocals and occasionally pen the odd song. After the band ended with the tragic death of Cobain in 1994, this experience provided him with the keys to emerge as a creative force in his own right.
Like Cobain, Grohl has been an influential artist because he has not confined himself to the limits of the classic rock and hardcore punk that motivated him. He proved this when speaking to Red Bulletin in 2021. Celebrating the release of Foo Fighters’ tenth studio album, Medicine at Midnight, he discussed a variety of songs that inspired him and made him envious that he didn’t write them.
The first was unsurprising: ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. A world-famous piano ballad by the former Beatles man, it was a pivotal track for Grohl when he was young. He said: “That’s how I learned to play guitar – John was my teacher.”
His second choice was ‘Sailin’ On’ by hardcore pioneers Bad Brains, a band Grohl has waxed lyrical about on numerous occasions. In addition to dubbing the “group America’s greatest hardcore punk-rock band in the 1980s” and “the best live band I’ve ever seen in my life”, he clarified that the breakneck pace of their furious music made him want to down beers and smash windows; the reason why he wishes he wrote it. He is, after all, a punk at heart.
However, Kim Wilde’s 1981 hit single ‘Kids in America’ was the most surprising inclusion. Inspired by the synth-pop of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Gary Numan, stylistically, it seems antithetical to everything Grohl is about. However, its story about a tough girl looking out of the window and thinking, “What the damn hell am I doing sitting here” does feel adjacent to punk.
Yet, it wasn’t the punky spirit of the hit that captured Grohl’s heart. He admitted that, like every punk rebel of his generation, Kim Wilde.
He explained: “Every punk-rock boy I knew was hopelessly in love with Kim Wilde, and so was I. That’s why I recorded my own version of Kids in America. It was in the days before I joined Nirvana – maybe 1989 – and I did it on a whim. I was at my friend’s basement studio, and I said, ‘Let me record this thing.’ It’s an iconic, anthemic song from the ’80s, and I love it as much as I loved her!”
It’s hard to imagine Dave Grohl jamming out to ‘Kids in America’. However, everyone has guilty pleasures, even if they are inextricably tied to a genre like the Foo Fighters leader.
