It’s one of the cruel rules of love and attraction that the more you try to impress someone, the less you’ll succeed; no-one likes a try-hard. And so it proves with rock’n’roll: heavily produced, overthought and desperate to please bands just don’t resonate like the ones who are doing it to please themselves. After a few albums on which Foo Fighters have felt like they were trying too hard to do the thing they once did so naturally – rock out – this secret set at Glastonbury, loosened of expectation, sees them finally relax back into what made them great.
They were billed as the Churnups, but this audience has clearly cracked the code: it’s one of the biggest crowds ever seen on this field, stretching back to verdant turf once staked out by the Rolling Stones, Chemical Brothers and (improbably) the Levellers in the annals of Pyramid big-hitters. “We’re not good at secrets,” smiles Dave Grohl at one point.
He frequently tells the crowd that he’s aware they only have an hour and that they need to bash through their songs, but actually this is a very long-form and extemporised set full of searching arrangements, extended solos, and ruminating, epic middle-eights. It sounds indulgent and even boring – isn’t the Pyramid meant to be all killer no filler? – but they make such a virtue of it, playing massive hit songs but with the guys-being-dudes feel of some dads spending their Saturday afternoon kicking out the jams in their garage while the kids are at their swimming lessons.
There’s so much fun in this set, from trading silly riffs between songs (“Slash is watching!” Grohl laughs) to Grohl mocking the audience for what he perceives as a poor singalong to The Pretender, doing a prissy little Jack Black-style clap and facial expression (though a slight weakness is that Grohl himself doesn’t hit the song’s twisted-nipple top notes). They will still be privately mourning but any vestige of grief at Taylor Hawkins’ death seems to have been banished – or rather they honour him by keeping his puckishness alive.
They begin with All My Life, all brawn and werewolf-bristle growing through their denim. It’s over five minutes long, and almost feels like a crowd introduction to new drummer Josh Freese – this is his first major outing since taking over from Hawkins and he is given plenty of room for showboating fills.
Seen side-on, slightly fuller of face and more mutton of chop, for a second Grohl faintly resembles Lemmy – and his band are very much channelling the raw, raunchy, high-sodium punk rock of Motörhead throughout this set. New and unfamiliar-to-most song Rescued is kept buoyant and populist with pummelling perma-rolls from Freese, while another new-ish song, No Son of Mine, is given yet more burly and generous proportions.
But of course Foo Fighters have the requisite sweetness and sentimentality that a garage band needs to access stadiums, and Learn to Fly is about as far from Lemmy as you can imagine: open-hearted and guileless in its trotting, girlish melody. My Hero’s own melody is as sturdy, galvanised and triangulated as the Pyramid stage it’s being played from, with a campfire simplicity to Grohl’s unadorned presentation that swells to meet its anthemic potential. His daughter Violet duets with him on new song Show Me How, and there’s a nice 90s alt-rock feel to it, like something by the Cranberries or Sundays. Violet, chewing gum and holding the mic like it’s a song she’s half bothered about at karaoke despite singing it in front of around 100,000 people, has clearly got the insouciant rock star genes from dad.
Time and again they do some of the hardest things to get right in rock: the one-note chorus of Best of You, the one-note riff of Everlong (dedicated to Hawkins), and guitar solos that are quite heroically unboring. The one for Best of You is a psych-rock wig-out, a sense amplified by the wind blowing it around while Freese plays another long drum fill that sounds like him falling down a very long flight of stairs in the fearless manner of a stuntman.
This set is clearly a way of them learning how to be a band again after being turned upside down by Hawkins’ death: there will be a proper headline tour next year, Grohl promises. You hope that when they get there, they don’t forget this sense of breezy, rangy fun. Foo Fighters sound like the electric shock of grief has startled them into life: a band who have looked at their instruments and remembered how they’re played.