Foo Fighters and Dave Grohl: Life after Death

It's been more than 30 years since rock music was still important and had great relevance. Artists were not pop bunnies who sang with computer voices, but stars with guitars, poets, explainers of the world.

We look back in a series. Today we hear again "Foo Fighters", die debut album of the Foo Fighters, the band who was after Nirvana... Fifteen months after Nirvana boss Cobain's suicide, the survivors come forward,

There were no posters, no free ticket promotions, no announcement interviews on the radio. The record by the completely unknown rock group Foo Fighters wasn't quite finished when the band recently came to London to play their first ever European gig. But of course it was still packed at Kings College" - after all, Dave Grohl and Pate Smear, two survivors of perhaps the most influential rock group of the 90s, were on the tiny stage.

And fifteen months after the tragic suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, the Foo Fighters, named after a strange ball-lightning-like light phenomenon that haunted Allied pilots during World War II, emphatically proved: It There is life after Nirvana. “It didn’t look like that at all at the beginning. Like Cobain's widow Courtney Love, Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic also fell into a deep hole of silence after the death of their self-despairing friend.

Krist Novoselic vented his grief by sending pages of strange messages ("Don't ask me how, don't ask me what - I'm just a simple worker's son") to all over the world via the Internet, night after night. Dave Grohl stunned the pain with work. The 26-year-old, who during the lifetime of the grunge god Cobain didn't have much more to do than drum and sing second voice in concerts, took advantage of the opportunity that the end of the supergroup Nirvana offered him The son of a journalist and an English teacher who divorced when he was six, he sold his drums.

Then Grohl got an electric guitar and dug out all the songs from his desk that he had already written during the Nirvana era, but which he had never included on the Nirvana albums because of the overwhelming Cobain compositions.

On "Foo Fighters", the recently released first work by Grohl's own band, Kurt Cobain, although never mentioned, is always present. The opener "This Is A Call" as well as the ballad "Big Me" could easily have been on the last Nirvana album "In Utero". Also songs like "I'll Stick Around" or Aloneâ+ With their dynamic dramaturgy, "Easy Target" bears more than a touch of Cobain's signature: crashing guitars meet sweet pop melodies, noise attacks suddenly dissolve into folky lightness.

However: Grohl, who was the last to join the successful Nirvana line-up, does not see himself as the administrator of a legend's legacy. "Not a single song is about Kurt," he apologized at Kings College, "that would just be embarrassing for him." Dave Grohl, a fan of the legendary Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham for twenty years, is not It's clear that Cobain was the gifted singer.

But he is sure of his means: he can breathe and scream, sing on the verge of breaking out and rattle subterraneanly. With the help of the mixer team Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who were previously responsible for Beck's huge hit "Loser", Grohl manages to create a well-rounded work. Colleague Krist Novoselic, with his new band Sweetâ 75 at their first live appearance during a party was enthusiastically celebrated, especially for a country song that he wrote in five minutes, will have to stretch, another corner of the Cobain legacy to get it.

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