X-clusive: Foo Fighters “I Get Nervous As Hell!”
Fresh from their Astoria and Carling Weekend performances, Xfm talks nerves, acoustic tours and the “responsibility to kick butt” with Foo Fighters sticksman Taylor Hawkins.
This year saw Foo Fighters, as a band, hit their Reading & Leeds hat-trick. While Hawkins may not have been in the band for their explosive tent-crumbling debut (“I saw footage of that - it was absolutely insane!”), he now plays behind the kit for arguably the biggest rock band on the planet. Not that this stops him getting a little nervous every now and then…
“I get f*cking nervous as hell!” the drummer begins. “I lose my mind right before we go on stage. I do – I’m not kidding! I always warm up a bit before I go on, but I just try and stay cool and relax.
“I treat every show the same way I treated shows when I was 21 years old. It could be the last show I ever play, and I treat it like that. I always go out fighting, I’ve never gone out complacent and bored. I have a responsibility to the band and to the audience to kick butt!
“It was fun [to go back and play London’s tiny Astoria],” he continues. “We’ve played those kind of places our whole career, so it’s great to go and play small clubs, I love it, it’s a whole different thing.”
As for the much-rumoured Foo Fighters ‘unplugged’ gigs, Hawkins continued to fuel the fire that the band will be returning to these shores armed only with acoustics and tambourines to air the second disc of ‘In Your Honour’.
“Right now we’re concentrating on the rock stuff, and then we’re gonna go back, hopefully in six months, and do an acoustic tour. We’ll be playing small places and I think it’ll be fun, really good for us. I won’t be sweating so much and I won’t be as nervous.
“It’s a different thing, y’know? When you’re the drummer in a rock band you’re carrying it, you have to make sure that everyone else has a good show – that’s you’re whole job. You have to make sure that the singer, the bass player and guitarist, have a solid foundation to work on.”
As for the band’s current ever-increasing status, Hawkins claims not to really notice. Apart from the bigger hotels, buses, gold-plated toilets…
“You feel like you’re bigger when you’re headlining than when you’re playing at three in the afternoon,” he considers. “And you feel like you’re bigger when instead of having one bus for everyone to pile onto you have two buses. You stay in nice hotels, instead of just OK hotels… There’re a lot of those things that make it, y’know, a little nicer.”
Hawkins also spoke about his relationship with the rest of the band and, more specifically, frontman Dave Grohl.
“We’re like brothers, in a weird way,” Taylor considers. “We don’t really hang out that much when we’re not working, because we hang out so much when we are working! We used to more, but now he’s married, and I’m getting married, and you grow up – it’s not a boys club any more.
“We’re not 20 any more, trying to screw everything you see, do all the drinks and all the drugs. We’ve grown up a little bit, but we do enjoy hanging out together.
I think a tight-knit group can create a great vibe on stage, but also four people that wanna f*cking kill each other – like The Who used to – that can also create a neat thing too. But there’s always issues, there’s issues in our band, there’s always that.”
Foo Fighters’ single ‘D.O.A.’ from the album ‘In Your Honour’ is out now.
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