By BRUCE DENNILL
The touring soundman for the Foo Fighters is not a popular man in South Africa right now. The long awaited live debut of Dave Grohl and his merry men (well, not so much in Pat Smear’s case – he’s avuncular full-time now) was, for many locals, an opportunity to scratch out an entry on their musical bucket lists. But a mix that sounded, for all five-and-a-half hours of the gig – support and headline acts combined – as though it had been passed through a bad phaser pedal wrecked aspirations of having the sort of experience fans had long dreamed of.
BLK JKS were not entirely convincing as the opening act, not because they didn’t deliver in terms of the quality of their playing, but because their eight-minute slabs of sound – they don’t play songs in the middle-of-the-road verses and choruses sense – seemed ill-designed to hold the attention of an audience distracted by the continuous movement of fellow punters on the way in to join the action and impatient to get to the hit-heavy set of the rather more straightforward (in conceptual terms) headliners.
Kaiser Chiefs, playing in the home stadium of their namesake football team, did a knock-up job, with enjoyably manic frontman Ricky Wilson setting the bar, in energy terms, for all that was to follow. His ability to time his galloping, leaping, stage frame-climbing, security barrier-balancing, crowd-baiting antics with being at his microphone for his next cue was remarkable; his knack of doing so without ever sounding out of breath even more so.
Hits including Everything Is Average Nowadays; Ruby and a muscular version of I Predict A Riot were well received, but this was a crowd in the mood for men with toothy grins and impressive moustaches and dammit, if Freddy Mercury wasn’t around, then Dave Grohl would do nicely.
The Foo’s opening sequence was as impressive as it was frustrating: six songs segued into each other, barely allowing room to breathe, and delivered at a volume that made your sternum vibrate and, if some rumours are to be believed, blew a set of FNB Stadium speakers. All, that is, except the vocals, which were at best indistinct and at worst inaudible, except for when Grohl went full banshee for some of the notes.
It’s unlikely that this was a problem with the hardware involved, as in those same six songs, none of the band’s guitars, which were subjected to a fair amount of vigorous manhandling, even threatened to go out of tune. Rather, it appeared to be a simple matter of someone not being able to ride a single sound desk slider according to how much effort Grohl was putting into a note – or more probably not willing to concede that such an action was necessary.
The band are phenomenal musicians, particularly the multi-tasking Grohl and Taylor Hawkins, a drummer whose things-hit-per-minute rate is astronomical, but who never sounds like he’s trying to fill a gap just for the sake of doing so. These chops are tied into the transparent enthusiasm they have for their craft. The Foo Fighters simply love to play, and putting in a three-hour shift at each gig means that their collective time spent with instruments in hand would probably run into a full month or more each year if they scheduled their shows back to back.
Included in the set are nods to influences such as Queen, Cheap Trick and the Rolling Stones, from whose back catalogue the Foos nick a track each during a portion of the set in which the band pay tribute to their own garage outfit roots.
Because of the physical effort the band put in and their commitment to providing the most exhaustive possible exploration of their back catalogue for their fans, it would be unfair to blame them for the unfortunate feeling of disappointment many concert-goers would have left the stadium with. That dubious honour must go to the person responsible for handling the vocal mix in particular and the overall combination of the rhythm instruments to a lesser degree.
Three hours. Dozens of gargantuan rock hits. Sinew-straining, eye-popping physical effort. Stamina that could shame a tri-athlete. All hugely impressive, and all diluted – wasted is too strong a term; just – by the frustration of straining, for the entire show, to hear what should be the focal point of each performance: the voices that drive the melodies and deliver the lyrics.
Grohl promised he and his cheerful mob would return soon. If they do, they have to improve this aspect of their show, It’s non-negotiable. To quote The Who (whose Pinball Wizard Kaiser Chiefs covered, with debatable success): “We won’t get fooled again”.
