Reading 2012: Foo Fighters, Main Stage

Before the Foo Fighters take the stage for their Sunday night headlining slot there is a rumour flying around the camp that they are going to play for three hours. Three hours?!? Our little group keeps repeating this to ourselves incredulously. Have the Foo Fighters really got that many songs? Even The Cure, with a back catalogue that spans over 30 years and 14 albums, only managed two and a half hours on Friday night.

A certain American website recently asked its readers to submit their favourite albums from 1996 to 2011. Quite neatly, that period almost exactly spans the Foo Fighter’s career, with only their self-titled debut missing the cut. Perhaps it says more about the website’s readership than the band, but Foo Fighters albums are conspicuous by their absence in the recently published results. No ‘The Colour and the Shape’ at number 24, no ‘Wasting Light’ at 96. By contrast, Radiohead feature FIVE times. And yet, despite this apparent absence of public approval, the Foo Fighters can legitimately claim to be one the biggest bands in the world; one of only perhaps half a dozen acts currently touring that could headline any festival anywhere in the world without an eyebrow being raised (ok, possibly not The Big Chill).

Perhaps some of those votes got lost in the mail, because Reading is noticeably busier today than on Friday and Saturday and there are an awful lot of Foo Fighters shirts proudly on display. As the band launch into the first part of their set, our aforementioned little group realises that we know a lot more Foo Fighter songs than we thought (‘All My Life’, ‘Learn to Fly’ ‘Breakout’ etc) and handily (because there is a lot of singing), we [aka Harriet Jennings, Features Editor] also know all of the words.

Okay, so there are drum solos and extended endings and a Pink Floyd cover and all those things we thought Nirvana stood against, but Dave Grohl (aka ‘the nicest man in rock’) is a genuinely excellent showman, sprinting from one edge of the stage to the other and screaming like his life depended on it He even brings his daughter on stage for ‘Walk’ and although it would appear insincere and creepy if Bono did it (for a start, why would Dave Grohl’s daughter be on tour with U2?) as she sits on a guitar amp swinging her feet and wearing ear protecters, it is a proper festival moment, and we start to realise just how the Foo Fighters got this big.

It helps that Dave Grohl and the Reading Festival obviously have history and before a stripped down ‘Times Like These’ he talks with with genuine affection about the first time Nirvana played there, mid afternoon in 1991, along with the Foo Fighters’ headline slot in the Melody Maker tent in ‘95.

As it transpires, they don’t quite play for 3 hours (I make it 2 hours, 45 minutes), but for the most part the set zips along, buoyed by a succession of genuine proper rock FM anthems. It finishes with fireworks and perhaps the one song the Foo Fighters can genuinely claim to be a modern classic, ‘Everlong’, before our group goes off to find the nearest catering van selling humble pie.