Just two nights after levelling The Academy Dublin and with Manchester’s O2 Ritz in their sights, Foo Fighters storm the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire for the second of three word-of-mouth, in-person-ticket-only club shows. No pre-sale frenzy. No dynamic pricing warfare. Just queues round the block and 2,000 devotees crammed into the Empire like it’s 1996 again.
Foo Fighters @ O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
They stroll on at 8:50pm — a casual twenty minutes past the billed time — six silhouettes against a low rumble of menacing guitars. Frontman Dave Grohl sports a new-on-the-scene Gibson RD Custom Ebony; alongside him are bassist Nate Mendel, guitarist Chris Shiflett, keyboardist Rami Jaffee, latest drummer Ilan Rubin and touring guitarist and Beck mainstay Jason Falkner. It feels both intimate and enormous at once.
“Are you fuckin’ ready? It’s gonna be a long night motherfuckers, you know that right?” Grohl smirks. “Let’s start from the beginning.”
They dive headlong into 1995 debut single This Is A Call and the Empire detonates. Every voice is raised, every word hurled back at the stage. There’s no easing in. All My Life follows with its menacing, one-chord spoken intro before exploding into cascading, headbanging chaos. Grohl paces side to side, hair flailing, urging the crowd to clap through an extended mid-song break as guitars and drums hammer with machine-gun precision. “Alright motherfuckers, you wanna dance?” he screams. We do. With everything we’ve got.
Crowd surfers begin their steady migration toward the barricade before the third song is done, ferried across a sea of hands and scooped away by security in the narrow pit. Times Like These offers brief uplift before Of All People provides the first taste of forthcoming twelfth LP Your Favorite Toy. It’s storming, less hook-driven than their radio mainstays, and over in a flash — a statement of intent rather than a concession to familiarity.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let me just tell you, what a fucking joy it is for me to hear you people sing so fucking loud. I love it so much. We’re gonna sing some songs together,” Grohl gushes as The Pretender shimmers into life. Mid-song he quizzes the room: “Do you love rock ’n’ roll music? Do you want some rock ’n’ roll music? Let’s rock ’n’ roll!”
As La Dee Da rings out, he calls for “those old-school, deep-cut Foo Fighters motherfuckers.” They get their wish with a thunderous Stacked Actors, its gentle sway snapping into blood-curdling choruses, one of the night’s heaviest hitters. Every track tonight stretches beyond its recorded counterpart — extended breakdowns, pounding drum solos, indulgent guitar licks. This is a band revelling in looseness. Grohl is back to playing his Gibson Trini Lopez at some point, switching up colours that match different tunings.
“I gotta be honest,” Grohl begins as These Days unfurls. “This is what it felt like 30 fuckin’ years ago. And I’m so happy… if you hear me laughing in the middle of songs, it’s ’cause I’m so fuckin’ happy that we’re still here.” He grins: “This is our last song.” Eight songs deep. No one believes him.
Walk becomes a mass stomp-along. “We should just play here every night,” he suggests. “We’ll do a residency, for the rest of our fucking lives.” He references the old-school ticket-buying process for these shows. “That’s how you used to do it!”
Foo Fighters @ O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire
To newcomers: “It amazes me that you got your asses off the couch and came down here to buy tickets without knowing what you were getting yourselves into… We’ve been a band for 30 years, we have a lot of fucking songs… some of you have to work tomorrow.” He pauses. “Just call in sick! Tell your boss your buddy Dave said: ‘it’s cool’. And then good luck finding another job!”
Band introductions follow. Mendel gets a nod to Sunny Day Real Estate. Former Wallflowers man Jaffee delivers a gloriously loose solo that Grohl frames as “side stage, dance tent, Reading 1992.” Falkner is hailed a “badass motherfucker,” filling in while Pat Smear recuperates from a broken leg.
Then: “This is my favourite number.” My Hero prompts a deafening singalong, Grohl surrendering the chorus to the crowd as he patrols the lip of the stage. Learn To Fly bounces with soft-pop exuberance before new LP title track Your Favorite Toy proves itself a future stadium titan.
No Son Of Mine folds into a cheeky nod to Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades, dedicated to Lemmy. Run arrives blistering and unrelenting. Rubin peels off into a solo. “I like to call that amuse bouche. It’s an amuse Shepherd’s Bouche,” Grohl quips. “When we do these smaller club gigs, I like it fuckin’ loose.”
They cool the temperature for Aurora, dedicated to the band’s late drummer Taylor Hawkins’ wife Alison, here with us in the audience tonight. Once a rarity, it now feels sacred — the Empire swaying in collective gratitude.
“Let’s play a fuckin’ rock ’n’ roll song, what d’ya say?” Grohl slurs, shifting gears from the heartfelt back to his usual dry wit. “Do you want a loud screaming a rock ’n’ roll song or do you want a pretty little love song?” he teases. The answer is White Limo, all guttural ferocity. Monkey Wrench and Hey, Johnny Park! keep the voltage dangerously high. “I’m contractually obligated to scream my fucking balls off every night,” he laughs. “Do you need me to teach you how to scream like a consummate professional?” Circle pits erupt as he conducts a mass howl.
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Foo Fighters @ O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire (Kalpesh Patel)
“We’d like to do something… we haven’t done for 25 years.” A320, the deep cut from the 1998 Godzilla film soundtrack, rumbles into the room — a genuine holy-grail moment.
“Who’s got one more in ’em?” he asks before Best Of You detonates in unified catharsis.
A brief disappearance, then they return.
“For all the old-school motherfuckers, thank you for growing old with us. For all you youngbloods… welcome to the fam.” A young fan is lifted from the crowd and placed side-stage for the encore. “There’s probably somewhere safer for that person to sit.”
They close as they used to three decades ago: Exhausted grinding and raw before Everlong seals the night. “You know it’s the last one, it’s time to dance.”
As the final chords of Everlong fade and the band take their bows, this doesn’t feel like a novelty club show or a clever album-launch stunt — it feels necessary. In the tight confines of Shepherd’s Bush Empire, you see the glances, the grins, the split-second cues; you feel the floor shift under Monkey Wrench and hear individual voices cutting through the mass catharsis of Best Of You. Thirty years in, Foo Fighters don’t resemble a legacy act preserving history — they look like a band reanimating it, rediscovering the sweat, looseness and reckless joy that built this in the first place. If these guerrilla gigs are about reminding themselves who they are before the next inevitable stadium run, consider the message received — loudly.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s renewal. In a 2,000-capacity room, thirty years deep, Foo Fighters sound as vital — and as loud — as ever. “That was fucking awesome, thank you very much.”
Live review & photography of Foo Fighters @ O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London by Kalpesh Patel on 25th February 2026.
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