Speaking with Kerrang!, Dave Grohl told some brilliant stories of his previous Reading performances with both Nirvana and Foo Fighters…
HEADLINING READING WITH NIRVANA
August 1992
“Reading changed me. I grew up with it, so headlining was unbelievable. When I first joined Nirvana, like the day I fucking moved up [to Seattle], Krist [Novoselic, bass] was having a barbecue in his back yard, and Dan Peters, the drummer from Mudhoney was there. He was talking about just getting back from England, and I said to him, ‘What’s the biggest audience you’ve ever played to?’ He said, ‘About 35,000 people,’ and I said, ‘Where the fuck was that!?’ He told me there’s this festival in England called Reading, and it’s huge. Then I saw it on our itinerary in ‘91, that we’d be halfway up the bill with Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop, and from the day I saw that on there, to the minute I walked out onstage, I would wake up every fucking morning in a panic attack that I had to go and play in front of that many people.
“A lot happened after that. In the 12 months between Reading ’91 and Reading ’92 when we headlined, the band had exploded… and imploded. We went from being a three-piece band in a splitter van with a tour manager and a monitor guy, to selling millions of records, and a lot changed. It was a pretty chaotic 12 months. Kurt got strung out and wound up having to go to rehab. I remember we finished that tour in early ’92, and we had toured America, we had toured Europe, we’d been to Australia and Japan, and we ended in Hawaii. By the time we got there we thought, ‘Okay, we need to fucking chill out, because the world has gone crazy – not just ours but everybody else’s.’ So, we took a break, and in that time Kurt had a kid, and had his ups and downs. It was chaos.
“I remember showing up to Reading ’92 and there being so many rumours that we weren’t going to play, that we had cancelled. I walked backstage and some of my best friends in bands that were opening would see me and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I’d go, ‘We’re fucking headlining!’ And they’d be like, ‘You’re actually going to play?!’ I didn’t realise there was any question that we were going to play. I knew within myself I was questioning if we could play, but I knew we were going to try.
“The show was a really reassuring, genuinely magical moment of everything coming together at the right time. I think we had practised once, the day before, and I just didn’t know if we could pull it off. That happened a bunch of times in Nirvana, where you’d think, ‘God, this is going to be a fucking disaster,’ and then it would turn out to be something beautiful. So yeah, it went great, but it’s sad that that’s the last time we ever played England, because it could have been better. We just didn’t play England enough, I don’t think. The memory is somewhat triumphant but melancholy, because we never came back.”
FIRST SHOW AT READING WITH FOO FIGHTERS
August 1995
“That was a riot – it wasn’t our idea! We’d played a show at King’s College in London, then came back to do Reading festival, which was kind of our first proper gig in England. They had us headlining the side stage, and I felt weird about that. I felt like, ‘Nobody’s even fucking seen us!’ I think the record [Foo Fighters, 1995] had been out for maybe a month or something, not long. But I didn’t feel deserving of headlining the tent, because we were a new band. I really thought of us as a new band; I didn’t think of it as some fucking sideshow shit, we were a band and I wanted to do it right. Our first tours we did in America we got the van and the trailer and we did it the way you should do it.
“I remember Björk was headlining the main stage, and maybe 45 minutes to an hour before we went on you could see the tent starting to fill up, and it was a hot day. The tent was getting more and more crowded, and the crowd around the tent was getting bigger and bigger. As we were setting up the gear I was thinking, ‘Oh God, this is going to be fucking chaos.’ I just knew it – but at that point it’s do or die, you’ve got to go for it. More people started crushing into the tent, and I remember at one point the promoter coming up to me and saying we can’t play on the side stage. He said, ‘You have to go on the main stage, after Björk.’ I said, ‘No fucking way are we going to go headline the main stage at the first legitimate show we have in the UK! I mean, I get it, I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but that’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?!’
“When you see the security guards starting to pass out, that’s a problem. There were people climbing up the poles and hanging from the fucking rafters, and as far as you could see it was this tight, packed wave of sweaty fucking lunatics with us just trying to get through every song. Maybe after three or four songs the promoter was on the side of the stage going, ‘You guys have to stop. Just stop!’ I turned to the audience and said, ‘I’m sorry, this guy’s telling us we have to stop,’ and there was this roar of ‘Noooo!’ And he looks at me and says (urgently) ‘Keep playing! Keep playing!’”
Dave Grohl will be headlining Reading and Leeds Festivals with Foo Fighters on 23-25 August – other headliners include The 1975, Post Malone and Twenty One Pilots.
Those who’ve missed out on the opportunity to buy Reading Festival Saturday (Post Malone/Twenty One Pilots) and Sunday (Foo Fighters) tickets can still purchase Reading Festival weekend tickets or head to Leeds Festival for the highly-anticipated August bank holiday weekend.