In collaboration with Frontier Touring
Australia and the Foo Fighters have had a love affair that’s almost 30 years long – and with their new album ‘But Here We Are’ debuting at number one in the ARIA charts plus a huge Australian and New Zealand tour coming up, it shows it no sign. of fading.
Every single one of Foo Fighters’ 11 studio albums has reached the top five in this country, and ‘But Here We Are’ is their ninth release in a row to reach the top spot. To help with the math: every Foos album of new material for more than two decades has reached number one.
The latest is ‘But Here We are’, a compact, to-the-point celebration of unvarnished rock’n’roll. And Dave Grohl knows how much Australia loves good rock music: “A lot of places don’t have the same passion for rock music as Australians,” he said. Sydney Morning Herald last year. “We’ve got a great thing going on in America, but you come here and there’s so many great bands down here and the gigs just keep going.”
They will be playing the new record on this upcoming national tour, the first since 2018 and also the first with new drummer Josh Freese following the tragic passing of Taylor Hawkins early last year. This will be their 14th visit to Australia, taking place in November and December 2023, and they’ll be joined by some of the finest young rock bands the country has to offer – among them Sydney stars Body Type and Grohl-approved ‘ shed rockers’ ‘ The chats. They will then return to the Southern Hemisphere in mid-January 2024 for a series of shows in New Zealand.
The Foo Fighters, and especially their leader Grohl, and Australia just catch each other – there is a commonality in a laid-back approach to life and boisterous humour. If he looked more at home down under, we’d call him Davo. The most beloved man in rock doesn’t dress with airs and graces, but everything he does is filled with class. Now good friends with rock royalty Paul McCartney, Grohl still plays it like he’s the luckiest man alive. And like Macca, he is always very willing to play the songs the audience wants to hear.
As Australia emerged from Covid isolation in 2021, Grohl personally ensured that the Foo Fighters were the first major band to return to our shores with a one-off show at CMHBA Stadium in Geelong. Not that they had been sitting idly by during the pandemic, as they found time to record a Bee Gees tribute album (as the Dee Gees) as well as a ridiculously good-natured horror comedy film Study 666.
However, the tape goes way back before that. On Anzac Day 2006, when two miners in Beaconsfield, Tasmania found themselves trapped almost a kilometer below the surface, they made a request for their iPods to be filled with Foo Fighters’ songs to help pass the time while they waited for rescue . During their two-week ordeal, Grohl heard about their plight and promised them two free tickets to a Foo Fighters show anywhere – and two cold beers – once they were rescued. Not only did Grohl keep that promise, he even composed a song, ‘Ballad Of The Beaconsfield Miners’, in their honour.
With the Foos currently running through a string of headline and festival dates across North and South America – and with rumors of a Glastonbury in the air – anticipation for their jaunt Down Under is only set to grow and tickets are set to fly out of the legendary. shelf. Reviews of their comeback performances so far have been nothing but positive, and all Foos fans know that when Dave Grohl is on stage, he floats around like a man half his age with something still to prove – that is, apart from his devotion to the joy of making raucous rock’n’roll with friends and doing it like it was the most important job on earth.
Foo Fighters will tour Australia in November and December 2023 – hitting Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and two dates in Melbourne. The band will then tour New Zealand in January 2024, playing Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington. General ticket sales start on Thursday 15 June – more info here