Review: Foo Fighters at HBF Park

Foo Fighters at HBF Park
w/ The Chats, Teenage Joans
Wednesday, November 29, 2023

If you were ever going to see a Foo Fighters show, surely this was it.

On the back of their best album in 25 years, But Here We Are, this tour was a long time coming. Postponed following the passing of former drummer Taylor Hawkins 18 months earlier, But Here We Are has galvanised the Foos into a contemporary force again, taking care of epics such as 10-minute belter The Teacher (more about that one later).

But first, let’s introduce you to Josh Freese. As Dave Grohl took delight in telling us on Wednesday, “he’s drummed in most of your favourite bands." Nine Inch Nails, Guns N’ Roses, Devo, A Perfect Circle, 100 Gecs—you name it. He’s a prolific heavy hitter.

Perhaps that’s why this was the heaviest Foo Fighters show ever seen on these shores. They came out with a roar on All My Life. It was a big intro for Freese, who was heavily featured on the screens as he absolutely pounded the skins.

“Alright, motherfuckers, do you wanna dance?” Grohl screamed, and dance they did. They sounded like fucken Motorhead through No Son of Mine as the onslaught continued (it turns out this one is much better live), interpolating the eternal riffs of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Then Rescued felt like a statement. A first taste of the new record, the lyrics “We’re all waiting to be rescued tonight,” reminded us of the gravity of the occasion.

It was nothing short of cathartic to that point, but the release came next in quick succession. First, The Pretender (we all know that one rocks), then on Walk, it was official: the warm-up was over. Six tracks in, and it was time for a breather, but the tender organ singalong on Times Like These was a misnomer as the familiar riff finally stomped the song to its more well-known conclusion.

It had been a start for the ages, but the fast and furious was far from over with Grohl’s ode to Winona Ryder, Stacked Actors, in a back-to-back 1999 throwback with Breakout, yet another showcase for Freese’s frenetic drum skills.

Eventually, through band introductions including brief covers (Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop for Pat Smear, Devo’s Whip It, and Nine Inch Nails’ psycho March of the Pigs for Freese etc.), foundations were laid for the set’s next section.

This part we’ll call ‘the anthems’. Kicking off with a spine-tingling My Hero, it was the first in a series of singalongs, including the Tom Petty-inspired highlight Learn to Fly, an exhaustingly good Arlandria, and the monster production of These Days.

The latter made it clear that this was not the Foos as we’ve seen them before. Where in the past Dave Grohl may have danced up and down a 50-metre catwalk, such props were gone, and this was all about visual spectacle. State-of-the art lighting and compelling video imagery were matched with sonic fireworks throughout the set’s final stanza, during which it became more and more apparent that Josh Freese is actually quite a good drummer.

Monkey Wrench and This Is a Call headlined this section, but it was an elongated and simply transformed Aurora that left jaws on the floor. “We like to do this song every night, because this is Taylor Hawkins’ favourite Foo Fighters’ song,” Grohl told us, before an anecdote about that time he ended up in jail on the Gold Coast because he and Hawkins went out drinking and scootering after the Big Day Out. It was the feel-good emotional core of the night and also the first of three 10-minute sagas making up the night’s peak.

That probably sounds like too much, right? It wasn’t. Best of You, always better live than on your local sporting channel, has never sounded or looked as good as this. Leading into the encore, it was an absolutely electric moment as the breakdown for an impromptu crowd chant built back up to a ferocious crescendo of guitars and lights that seemed to keep going forever.

Could it get any better? The encore tells us yes. Foos have never released a song quite like The Teacher before, and they’ve never looked this good playing anything.

It was Tool-like in its visual splendour and simply epic in spectacle, as winding roots morphed into animations that became more and more psychedelic. Meanwhile, Grohl was clearly living out some childhood fantasies on a double-neck SG, and the result? More really is more.

It all left Everlong as the perfect celebratory finale, and that timeless chorus “If anything could ever be this good again” never felt so apt.

Perhaps the only minor quibbles were a mercilessly brief acoustic set and the fact that the Foos didn’t bring a big-name support with them, as they have done in the past with the likes of Weezer, Tenacious D, Fucked Up and Rise Against.

That’s nothing against Teenage Joans or The Chats though, who must both be getting used to the stadium lights after scoring some huge supports in the past 18 months. The latter in particular proved a hit with the fast-growing sea of rockers despite the event’s early start, tearing through the likes of 6L GTR and Smoko.

Perth has had some amazing shows in 2023, and only 10 days earlier, Coldplay set a benchmark as high as any for vivid colours paired with groundbreaking sound and vision. The Foos haven’t traditionally been competitors with the U2s, Taylor Swifts, and Roger Waters spectacles, but here they turned a corner. It was all cathartic emotional heft paired with dazzling bells and whistles that will keep this one in conversation for the year’s best.

HARVEY RAE

Photos by Stu McKay