Dave Grohl’s inspiring drum battle with 10-year-old Nandi Bushell
“When she called me out, I didn’t know what to do,” said the Foo Fighters frontman. “I’ve never been in a drum battle, especially with a 10 year-old girl from England.”
A few months deep into the pandemic that had brought much of the world’s music industry to a standstill, rock ‘n’ roll workaholic Dave Grohl began feeling somewhat at sea.
“We’ve been so busy for the last decade that the prospect of having a little time off didn’t scare me too much,” the Foo Fighters frontman tells The Australian. “But it was two or three months in that I started getting restless, because ultimately, we make these records and these songs for people to hear.”
It was during this enforced break from recording and performing the music that had defined his life for more than three decades that he began to sense a tidal wave building out on the horizon and headed his way.
The first warning came from his friend Butch Vig, the music producer who recorded Nevermind, the iconic 1991 album that rocketed Nirvana – with Grohl behind the drum kit – from small-time Seattle trio to generation-defining rock act.
For some time, Vig had been emailing Grohl videos of an extraordinary young musician who had been filming herself playing the drums for a growing audience on YouTube. One of her most popular clips was a cover of In Bloom, the second track from Nevermind, complete with impassioned mid-song screams.
“At first, I thought it was just kind of funny,” says Grohl. “Butch said, ‘Look at this girl, she’s beating the shit out of these drums.’ I thought it was adorable and inspiring. I mean, she’s 10 years old: I think most musicians at 10 years old were in love with and discovering their instrument, and playing it with all their heart.”
The girl in question was Nandi Bushell, a precocious player based in the British town of Ipswich who has racked up more than 27 million YouTube views in recent years while covering popular songs by bands such as the White Stripes, Muse, System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine, sometimes with her father joining her on guitar.
Published in November last year, her Nirvana cover had reached 1.7 million views and was her most popular video until August, when Nandi recorded herself playing along to Everlong, the uplifting and optimistic signature song by Foo Fighters, the one-man band that Grohl formed in 1994 following the suicide death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.
Rather than just playing along to Everlong’s tricky cymbal pattern, though, Nandi began the video with a call to action. “Dave Grohl, I challenge you to a drum-off,” she said, pointing a drum stick as long as her forearm at the camera.
Nandi’s cover would soon attract nearly three million viewers, one of whom was the man who wrote and recorded the now-iconic song in 1997, after Grohl had recruited several bandmates to join him under the Foo Fighters banner for second album The Colour and the Shape.
“When she called me out, I didn’t know what to do,” says Grohl. “I really didn’t. I didn’t know how to go about it. I’ve never been in a drum battle, especially with a 10-year-old girl from England.”
Out at sea, the tidal wave continued to build momentum, and this time it wasn’t only Vig sharing her videos with Grohl, a committed non-user of social media.
“It took about a week and about 50 texts from 50 different people, basically saying, ‘Dave, step up. Come on – you have to respond to this. You have to represent’,” he says. “So I did.”
Within a fortnight, Grohl responded by recording himself playing along to Everlong at home – on a blue drum kit that belongs to Harper, one of his three daughters – while wearing headphones and a red flannel shirt. After a few bars, he silenced the cymbals and addressed the camera.
“You’re an incredible drummer, and I’m really flattered that you’ve picked some of my songs to do for your videos,” he said, using his drum sticks to exaggerate his gestures. “You’ve done them all perfectly, so today, I’m going to give you something you may not have heard before.”
Then one of the world’s most acclaimed rock ‘n’ roll musicians set his 10 year-old fan a new challenge: to learn to play along to Dead End Friends, a 2009 song from the debut album released by Them Crooked Vultures, a supergroup which featured Grohl on drums alongside Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme on guitar and vocals.
“This is my response to your challenge, so now the ball is in your court,” he said.
This entire exchange was recorded in an adorable video published on Nandi’s YouTube page, which captured her evident delight at not only getting a response from the Foo Fighters frontman, but a new assignment, too.
From that point, Grohl was no longer wary of the tidal wave but had instead chosen to ride it alongside Nandi. She posted her cover of Dead End Friends on September 3, complete with red flannel shirt and handwritten graffiti on her black drum kit that read “Grohl rocks”.
By September 14, he had written and recorded something new for her – because “every superhero needs a theme song”, he noted in the video description – with The Grohlettes (aka his daughters) on backing vocals.
“That back and forth just became this story in itself: two people that are thousands of miles apart, having this conversation with drums,” says Grohl. “It was f..king great.”
In terms of its sheer goodwill and purity, the exchange called to mind another great interaction earlier this year between globally famous musicians and a civilian armed with a smartphone, when Fleetwood Mac’s classic song Dreams became a surprise chart hit 43 years after its release thanks to a cranberry juice-swilling American skateboarder and TikTok user named Nathan Apodaca.
Nandi’s reaction video now has more than two million views, and when asked why their dialogue resonated so strongly, Grohl replies, “Because it brought happiness, and joy, and maybe four minutes of relief from the constant anxiety and doom of our depressing news cycle. For people to click on to something on the internet and have it bring a smile? That’s in short supply these days.”
Having only interacted through prerecorded home videos, the pair recently spoke for the first time, with the exchange captured on YouTube, naturally.
“I finally actually got to meet her on Zoom about a week ago, and I was starstruck,” he says. “I think really what it is, is that there’s some hope or some light in Nandi. You look at her and you think, ‘If this is our future, we’re in good hands’. She’s optimistic and inspiring, and she’s just a force of f..king nature. I think we’ll be hearing a lot from her for years to come. She’s a badass.”
To mark its 25th anniversary Foo Fighters had booked a 10-date US tour this year composed of stops from its inaugural run of shows in 1995, with the six-piece also turning back the clock by opting to tour in a van, just like the old days.
At each concert, the band also planned to host a preview of a new documentary named What Drives Us, where Grohl explores the physical and psychological impacts of life on the road by speaking with members of the Beatles and Metallica, among others.
COVID-19 forced the cancellation of that tour, as well as a pause on plans for the band to release its 10th album. At first, a little downtime was a welcome change from the frantic pace at which Grohl tends to live his life as frontman of one of few rock bands capable of filling stadiums, as Foo Fighters did on its last tour of Australia in January 2018.
Earlier this month on US TV program Saturday Night Live, the band premiered a new song named Shame Shame, which pivots on a curiously minimalist drum and bass pattern before exploding into a soaring vocal melody in the chorus. The release of album No 10 has been rescheduled for February and its title revealed as Medicine at Midnight.
In the meantime, Grohl – who describes himself as an eternal optimist – is setting his eyes to the horizon and imagining a tidal wave of a different sort, when he and his band can safely take to the stage again to hear tens of thousands of people singing along to songs like Everlong.
“I am hopeful that it will all come back around some day, sooner or later; hopefully sooner,” he says. “I look forward to the day I come back and stand on a stage in Australia, and open up with a song and listen to the entire audience sing at the top of their lungs. I can visualise that. I can imagine that happening.”
Medicine at Midnight will be released on February 5, 2021 via RCA/Sony Music Australia.
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