Why did Foo Fighters use the British spelling for ‘The Colour and the Shape’?
Dave Grohl is a man filled with unique quirks. There’s his obsession with extraterrestrials and unidentified flying objects, the likes of which led to both the name of his band, Foo Fighters, and the name of his record company, Roswell Records. The former was a World War II era term for UFOs, while the latter referenced the New Mexico city that was home to a notorious 1947 flying saucer incident.
Some quirks, like Grohl’s habit of labelling his personal studios with the number 606, don’t have easy answers. “It’s a dumb, lucky number I’ve had since I was a little kid,” was the only explanation that Grohl has for that one.
Why is one of the band’s heaviest songs, ‘Weenie Beenie’, named after a hot dog stand that you can still visit in Shirlington, Virginia? “The first time I recorded that song, I didn’t have a title for this song,” Grohl told the crowd at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club, just a few miles away from the one remaining Weenie Beenie, in 2021. “So I saw that Weenie Beenie, and I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s just call it ‘Weenie Beenie””.
Grohl is an enigmatic figure, and perhaps the most critically acclaimed Foo Fighters record comes with its own curious feature. The Colour and the Shape was released back in 1997 and contains some of the band’s most popular songs, not least of which is their signature track, ‘Everlong’. Also filling out the LP are all-time classics like ‘Monkey Wrench’, ‘My Hero’, ‘February Stars’, and ‘Walking After You’.
That sense of randomness has always been part of what makes Grohl tick. There’s rarely a grand explanation behind his decisions, more a case of following whatever feels right in the moment and trusting that it will land somewhere interesting by the time it reaches the finished product.
It also feeds into the way the band approached that period in general. Nothing about The Colour and the Shape feels overly laboured or overthought, even though a huge amount of work clearly went into it, and those small, almost throwaway details end up becoming part of the album’s identity without anyone needing to spell them out.
But one part of The Colour and the Shape isn’t easily explainable unless you look into it: why did the band use the British spelling of “colour”? None of the band members at the time were British – Grohl is a native Virginian, Pat Smear a Los Angeles man, and Nate Mendel hailed from Seattle, Washington – so why go with the British version of “colour”?
That would be in honour of producer Gil Norton, a native Brit. “We worked really hard on The Colour and the Shape with Gil Norton, who is famous for just cracking the whip in the studio. He’s just an incredible producer, but he works you really hard. And he likes things to be perfect,” Grohl told Exclaim. “I think because [Colour and the Shape] has been around so long and had some of our biggest songs on it, people just sort of consider that to be our real milestone, best album.”
Norton was famous for producing some of the Pixies’ most iconic albums, including Doolittle, Bossanova, and Trompe le Monde. Additionally, Norton had logged production credits with bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, Throwing Muses, and Counting Crows before getting the invitation to work with the Foo Fighters. Although his style was demanding, partially contributing to the departure of drummer William Goldsmith, Norton was invited back to produce the Foo’s sixth studio album, Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace, in 2007.
Check out ‘Monkey Wrench’ from The Colour and the Shape down below.
