Dave Grohl reflects on Foo Fighters’ classic Wembley Stadium show: “It’s almost as if I had fallen into a Led Zeppelin movie”

The band joined forces with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones at the classic gig

Dave Grohl has reflected on Foo Fighters‘ classic shows at Wembley Stadium, which saw them joining forces with Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.

The band played two nights at the iconic London venue in June 2008, a year after making their debut there as part of the line-up for Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts.

The second night saw Grohl coming good on a promise to “pull out all the stops” by bringing out Page and Jones to perform Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’, with drummer Taylor Hawkins on vocals.

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Recalling how he secured their involvement, Grohl told EW: “Being a Led Zeppelin freak — you know, I’ve got Led Zeppelin tattoos — I thought ‘Well, we’ve gotta call John Paul Jones.’ We had wound up performing ‘The Pretender’ with him that year at the Grammys and we made friends so I figured, this is the most momentous occasion of my entire life, why not call the band that changed it all for me?

“So I got on the phone with Jimmy Page and he basically said ‘Well what do you want to do?’ And I was terrified to answer. I felt like I was in a waking dream. But I had to say something, so I said ‘How about ‘Rock and Roll’?’ so he said ‘Yeah, what else?’

“I said ‘How about ‘Ramble On’?’ he said, ‘Great, see you at rehearsals.’ I mean it was that easy, I couldn’t believe it.”

Grohl then recalled the moment when Page & Jones joined the band in front of 90,000 fans, and admitted it didn’t “feel real”.

“To sit on a drum stool, look to my left and see Jimmy Page, look to my right and see John Paul Jones — was actually happening,” he said.

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“Just being eight feet away from Jimmy Page as he played this classic song and shredded these classic leads is just so hard to explain. It’s almost as if I had fallen into a Led Zeppelin movie or something, it didn’t even feel real.”

A year after the show, Grohl went on to form the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures alongside Jones and Queens Of The Stone Age‘s Josh Homme.

His comments come after the band shared the Wembley Stadium show in full on YouTube last week. 

It’s the latest edition of the band’s ongoing ‘Foo Fridays’ series, where they share full footage of a classic gig from their archives. Last month, they shared a stream of their massive Hyde Park gig from 2006.

Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins also recently joined a number of musicians, including Dua LipaColdplay’s Chris Martin, Sam FenderBastille and Ellie Goulding, for a special cover of Foo Fighters’ ‘Times Like These’ that was organised by BBC Radio 1, with proceeds being split between Comic Relief and Children In Need.

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