Watch Foo Fighters play with Paul McCartney and Travis Barker at Taylor Hawkins tribute concert
Saturday night saw the first of two tribute concerts in commemoration of late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died in March. Promised by Dave Grohl as “a gigantic f*cking night for a gigantic f*cking person,” the event featured performances from countless rock legends, spanning six hours and 50 songs.
Taking place at Wembley Stadium, the gig featured appearances from Liam Gallagher, Chrissie Hynde, Mark Ronson, Josh Homme, Brian Johnson, Rush, and DEVO drummer Josh Freese. Them Crooked Vultures, which features Homme and Grohl, also reunited for the first time in 12 years, much to the excitement of fans.
Grohl declared, “We’re gonna play some of the Foo Fighters songs with some of Taylor’s friends – his favourite drummers and his good friends – coming up to play with us. So there’s gonna be kind of a revolving door of drummers who are gonna come up and celebrate Taylor’s fucking awesome drums.”
One drummer to grace the stage was Blink 182’s Travis Barker, with Grohl sharing the story of how Barker and Hawkins met: “Apparently, Taylor met this guy when this guy was a fucking garbage man in Taylor’s neighbourhood and Taylor started going to see his band play when he was a young kid. Taylor would always tell him, ‘You’re gonna be a star, man. You’re gonna be a star’. Years later, we wound up on tour with his band and now, he’s gonna sit in with us to play a couple songs.”
Barker played ‘The Pretender’ and ‘Monkey Wrench,’ some of Foo Fighters’ biggest hits, before making way for a series of other drummers, such as Nandi Bushell, a 12 year old drummer who once challenged Grohl to a drum battle. Hawkin’s 16 year old son Shane also played, who delivered an emotionally powerful performance as he thrashed his way through ‘My Hero.’
However, one of the biggest names to appear alongside the band was none other than Paul McCartney, who walked on stage with the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde. McCartney said, “God bless Taylor” before stating that “Me and Chrissie are gonna do a song here that I haven’t done since we recorded it 100 years ago. I’ve never done it as a duet, but we’re gonna do it tonight for the first time for you.”
Alongside the Foo Fighters and frequent David Bowie drummer Omar Hakim, they played ‘Oh! Darling’ from the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. After Hydne left the stage, McCartney shared an anecdote with the audience before playing ‘Helter Skelter.’
“Dave rang me up one day and he said, ‘Taylor’s written this song called ‘Summer Rain’, and he said, ‘We’d like you to drum on it.’ There’s this group who’ve got two of the best drummers in the world and they want me to drum on it? So I did. It’s quite a memory.”
Check out the performance of ‘Oh! Darling’ below:
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