my face hurts this morning, because I’ve spent the past 12 hours grinning. you’ll have to forgive the obsequiously sycophantic tone of this post, but i feel like a kid who just got a bike for christmas.

kim, andy, j and i went to see the foo fighters play at earl’s court last night (the tickets were an incredibly thoughtful birthday present from k & a.) we met up at the tube station at 7:15ish. the show was to start at 7:30, but with two opening acts (the futureheads and eagles of death metal), it seemed reasonable to assume that the foos would not actually grace the stage until at least 9:00, so we popped into a pub for a few pre-show pints.

ambling back up the road after a couple of beers, we suddenly heard the recognisable strains of a foo song… we were missing them!! as i used to say in 8th grade, we booked it. flew through the gates and security, raced towards the floor, charged through the crowd as they broke into “my hero”. finally stopped to catch our breath.

and there he was. sweaty and goofy and gorgeous beyond belief. swoon.

i started jumping up and down screaming, and didn’t stop for the next two hours. they ripped into hit after hit as we sang along at the top of our lungs. j kept lifting me up so i could see above people’s heads. it was definitely amazing arena rock, with strobe lights, screens, and a blanket of lasers that sliced the place in half. the set list had all my personal favourites: “generator”, “the one”, “times like these”. better than i could have ever hoped. dave was disarming and affable with a crowd of nearly 20,000, at one point dedicating a song to “the 6,000 people 6,000 feet away from me”. he belched, he threw beer into the crowd, he tried to get a 45 year old virgin laid. is it any wonder i love him so? and then…

… in the middle of a guitar solo (during an extended version of “stacked actors” i think it was), people around me suddenly started shifting to the right. in a brief moment, i understood what was happening and ran. dave magically appeared at a podium in the middle of the arena floor, and there he was – about 4 meters away from me. i screamed. i jumped around. i actually shouted the words “i love you dave!” i finally understood how girls at concerts faint with excitement. he was right there. I could see his 3-day-growth beard. i practically got hit with the sweat flying off his drenched hair. it was incredible. i can die happy now.

the rest of the concert was a thrashing hazy blur. during the encore (”cold day in the sun”), dave and taylor swapped places and dave took up behind the drums – so good to see him back there. (incidentally, apparently he also made a surprise appearance for warmup band eagles of death metal, drumming as “diablo”, which we missed. guess the early bird does get the worm.)

the full set list was:

In Your Honor
No Way Back
My Hero
Best Of You
Up In Arms
Learn To Fly
Times Like These
The One
Stacked Actors
Big Me
Breakout
Generator
Have It All
Everlong
Monkeywrench

(encore)
This Is A Call
Cold Day In The Sun
All My Life

highlights included… well, everything. screaming myself into a throat hernia during “breakout”, acoustic “everlong”, and seeing dave up close.

sidenote: dave is apparently enamoured of coldplay, and wouldn’t shut up about them the whole night. towards the end of the show, kim pointed out a few vips on the podium dave appeared at and said they looked very familiar, particularly a ginger bloke in a hat. watching telly this morning, i realised it was, in fact, chris martin.

after the show, we unwound with a few more pints at a gay bar somewhere on brompton road. so in total, my alcohol intake was 4 pints over the course of the evening. felt absolutely fine going to bed. woke up this morning with the worst headache (a low-grade migraine which i have been staving off with copious quantities of ibuprofen and coffee). I am turning into an embarrassing lightweight in my old age.

here’s some pics I stole from someone else of last night’s show:

this calls for a tribute playlist. here’s a bunch of acoustic bits (”everlong” and “times like these”) along with some hilarious spoof stuff (for j – thanks for being so tall!) and a couple officially unreleased/bootleg songs (”butterflies” and “friend of a friend”) . the sound quality isn’t great on some of these, but still a fun listen.

MP3 playlist (M3U)

and here’s the podcast feed

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podcast, mp3, , foo fighters, dave grohl