Foo Fighters Frontman Dave Grohl Opens Australian Tour: Three Hours, Two New Songs

Foo Fighters have opened their Australian stadium tour in Brisbane, and frontman Dave Grohl managed to fall flat on the runway before the band had played a note. He laughed it off, grabbed the microphone and spent the next three hours doing what Australian crowds have paid to watch him do for three decades: playing the hits, telling the old stories and refusing to leave the stage.

The opening-night reviews agree on the stamina and the affection. The setlist adds a sharper detail. The tour is out promoting Your Favorite Toy, the band’s new album and the first with drummer Ilan Rubin, yet that record barely got in the door at Suncorp Stadium: its title track and one other song, the second played acoustic on a secondary stage out on the runway. The night belonged to the back catalogue, and Grohl framed it that way himself.

Grohl’s pitch to Australia: still here after three decades

Over the opening arpeggios of “These Days”, Grohl went back to the band’s first Australian visit, on the Summersault tour of 1995, now the subject of a documentary, The Best Summer. “We were little f—ing kids, man,” he told the crowd, according to Billboard’s account of the show. “I’m so f—ing grateful, and lucky, that we’re still here 30 years later, and coming to tour for you guys again. It would take a lot to say no to Australia.”

The schedule backs up the line. Billboard counts three Australian visits in about a year, all produced by Frontier Touring: a one-off stadium show in Launceston, Tasmania, in January, which cost the band 48 hours of travel for a three-hour set; this leg; and a return in late January for New Zealand and a closing night in Perth. Rolling Stone Australia puts the band’s tally of Australian shows at 82 and called this their first time in the country since 2023. That is true of a full tour, not of the band, which flew in for that single Tasmanian night. Grohl even told Brisbane that the “Big Me” video, the band’s parody of a mints commercial, was shot in Australia.

Two songs from the new album in a 26-song night

Your Favorite Toy, the band’s 12th studio album, came out in April. It is the first Foo Fighters record with Rubin, and it drew some of the band’s warmest reviews in years; Pitchfork called it “the leanest, meanest Foo Fighters album in 30 years”. In Brisbane, though, only two of its ten songs made the setlist Billboard published: the title track, on the main stage, and “Window”, in the acoustic set alongside “Wheels”, “Marigold”, “Big Me” and “Under You”.

Everything else was history. The first ten songs ran as a greatest-hits block, opening with “All My Life” and moving through “The Pretender”, “Times Like These”, “My Hero” and “Learn to Fly”. “Marigold”, which Grohl first put out on his 1992 solo cassette Pocketwatch and later recorded with Nirvana as the B-side of “Heart-Shaped Box”, came dedicated “to all the Nirvana people here tonight”. Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” turned up inside “No Son of Mine”, and the encore brought Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, with guitarist Chris Shiflett playing the famous saxophone riff on guitar. Music Feeds calls it the song’s tour debut; according to The Live Wire, Grohl told the crowd he believed the band had only ever played it for a BBC recording decades ago. The night closed, as it always does, with “Everlong”.

Even the song count depends on who is counting. Billboard and Music Feeds list 26; The Live Wire counts 30, because the band introductions strung together five songs, one from each member’s other bands: No Use for a Name’s “Invincible” for Shiflett, Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Seven” for bassist Nate Mendel, The Wallflowers’ “One Headlight” for keyboardist Rami Jaffee, the Germs’ “Manimal” for guitarist Pat Smear and The New Regime’s “Tap Dancing in a Minefield” for Rubin.

None of this read as a weakness on the night. Every review describes a stadium singing along, and Rolling Stone Australia’s only real complaint was a dip in energy during the acoustic stretch. But it shows where the band thinks its Australian audience lives. Billboard describes a crowd of “old school” Generation X fans with their kids along for the ride. Grohl sold them an anniversary rather than an album, and they bought it.

Ilan Rubin’s first full Australian tour

The bigger unknown was behind the kit. Rubin, formerly of Nine Inch Nails and Angels & Airwaves, replaced Josh Freese, and this is his first full Australian tour with the band. Billboard wrote that he “didn’t miss a beat” and “left no doubt about his supreme talents” across several drum solos. The Live Wire singled out his playing on “Rope” and “Run”. Rolling Stone Australia admitted it is hard to watch the band without Taylor Hawkins, then said that if there were any cracks, “you certainly wouldn’t be able to spot them tonight”.

Then came the role reversal. For “Tap Dancing in a Minefield”, Rubin took a guitar and Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer long before he was anyone’s frontman, sat back down behind the drums for a few minutes. Hawkins, who died in 2022, had his own moment: the band played “Aurora”, from 1999, and Grohl introduced it simply. “We play it every night for Taylor Hawkins.”

Where the Take Cover tour goes next

The band played from 7:30pm to 10:30pm, according to Billboard, after a day that hit 35°C at midday, per Rolling Stone Australia, in front of a near sold-out, all-ages crowd; Music Feeds reports hydration stations and misting fans to get people through it. Byron Bay’s Mini Skirt and Brisbane’s Full Flower Moon Band opened.

The tour moves to Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville on Saturday, November 7, then Accor Stadium in Sydney (November 10), McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle (November 12), Marvel Stadium in Melbourne (November 14) and Coopers Stadium in Adelaide (November 17). After a break it resumes at One New Zealand Stadium in Christchurch on January 19, 2027, moves to Western Springs Stadium in Auckland on January 22 and ends at HBF Park in Perth on January 25. The setlist is not fixed: Music Feeds notes that “Exhausted” was on the written list in Brisbane and was dropped on the night.

In Brisbane, three decades of hits got the stadium and the album the tour is meant to promote got two slots, one of them acoustic. Eight more nights will show whether that is the plan or just the first draft.

Tags: Foo Fighters, concert tours, Dave Grohl, Ilan Rubin, Your Favorite Toy