The artist that Dave Grohl didn’t want to follow onstage: “That’s insane”
Dave Grohl is usually a ball of energy from the moment he goes onstage. Regardless of whether he was playing with Nirvana or fronting Foo Fighters, Grohl was never going to be satisfied until he had the entire crowd jumping to the music by the time the set was over. Even though Grohl’s brand of high-energy rock and roll was every fan’s dream in the late 1990s, the frontman admitted that he was terrified trying to follow what Björk had been doing.
If you think about it for more than two seconds, Björk and Foo Fighters fans probably shouldn’t be on the same bill together at all. Grohl is known for making arena rock that makes people pound their fists in the air, yet the Icelandic music legend was more likely to casually take risks on her art-rock projects.
Despite being about as similar as apples and pipe bombs, they found themselves on the same bill when touring the festival circuit. As much as some fans didn’t like the idea of artists putting labels on themselves, Grohl was convinced that he was going to get clobbered the minute he walked onstage.
For all the creative hutzpah that he puts out there whenever he plays, Grohl thought that playing the Reading Festival right after Björk would have been insane, saying, “There were so many in the tent that the promoters were like, ‘You should just go on after Björk on the big stage: I was like, ‘We don’t want to go on after Björk. She’s famous. That’s insane. We can’t just come over and headline Reading right off the bat, it’s a bad idea’.”
While Grohl was proven right when the audience started to pass out halfway through their performance, he was able to bring it back around and play one of the best shows of their early years. You have to remember this was 1995 when Foo Fighters were still a baby band, and hearing their slight grunge-infused take on rock and roll actually seemed to bridge the gap between two different generations of alternative music.
But bringing Björk into the mix would always be a bit of a weird gamble. She had always been one to flirt with different genres, but her electronic-tinged take on popular music didn’t exactly fit into any box, let alone part of a massive festival meant to bring together the biggest rock bands of the time.
If there’s one thing that Björk does well, though, it’s being able to cross genre boundaries. It’s one thing for Foo Fighters to get people on their feet, but whereas they are all about getting the most out of an audience that they can, Björk has always been the kind of artist who lulls her listeners into a bit of a trance whenever she plays, almost like painting subtle pictures in your mind whenever she plays.
While Grohl was going to stay in his own lane as a rocker, certain elements of later Foo Fighters records at least take influence from Björk’s style, from the strange electronic glitch sounds on ‘Enough Space’ to working with one of Björk’s video producers for the song ‘Everlong’. Stepping up to her talent level might seem intimidating, but Grohl learned an important lesson that day: when it comes to good music, there are no real boundaries.
