Dave Grohl's high volume of work

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Wanna hear Dave Grohl's new album? Take your pick.

That's him drumming - explosively - on the Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, a record widely considered the best big noise to come out of the States this year.

Or there's the new Foo Fighters' offering, One By One, the fourth album by the group he founded in the wake of most-important-band-of-its-era, Nirvana, shifting from drums to guitar-thrashing frontman.

It comes on like the band's most spirited offering since the "band's" 1995 debut, on which Grohl played and sang everything and instantly proved himself the musical over-achiever of the grunge generation. And a pop tunesmith to boot.

Next month comes the posthumous Nirvana's best-of, an album that finally got the green light this week after protracted legal wrangles with former Nirvana members Grohl and Krist Novoselic facing off against Kurt Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, compounded by Love's own contractual dispute with Universal Music.

This phone interview finds Grohl in Sydney a few days before the announcement that the case has been settled. It's been bitter. There's been a lot of name-calling. The operative phrase might be, no Love lost.

And in its latter stages, Grohl and Novoselic's lawyers unsuccessfully applied to have Love undergo a psychiatric examination to assess her mental health and its effect on the case.

So it's perhaps little wonder when the messy business is brought up we get the following game of ping-pong ...

What's it like being a former member of Nirvana given the recent difficulties?

"Can't talk about it."

Is it all wrapped up?

"Can't talk about it."

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

"Can't talk about it. Any more questions?

Is it that you're tired of talking about it?

"Can't talk about it."

You can understand why we're interested ... .

"Can't talk about it."

Which might sound fairly terse in print. But Grohl bats the questions away with the garrulous charm that has made his reputation as a Mr Utterly Nice Guy. He's possibly the least tortured famous person in rock.

Which is perhaps odd considering the tragic end of Nirvana, or the seemingly unstable line-up of Foo Fighters over the years - they're now on to their second drummer and third guitarist - or the fact that on the band's latest album they recorded it, hated it, and went back and did it again.

"We went for about three and a half months and decided it was too constrained and too clean and it just didn't sound familiar. It didn't sound like the band.

"After listening to everything we just kind of tossed it and went back into my basement and redid everything in about two and a half weeks."

"On the first version of the album we were so focused on production that we lost sight of what makes a good rock record, which is energy. It's not perfection and it's not production. It's just the energy you can hear through the speakers, and it worked."

In between the first and second recordings Grohl joined Queens of the Stone Age, the Californian band of fluid membership policy centred on frontline Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, and whose brand of hard rock is dark, weird, idiosyncratic and smart. Funnily, their previous album, Rated R, got them erroneously dubbed in some quarters "the new Nirvana".

Said Oliveri to the NME: "Dave's one of my favourite rock drummers so I think it's cool that he can come back to drums and show people he's still a rocker. He's a pop star in America. A POP star. He's showed people he's still hitting the skins hard."

Says Grohl: "I love Queens of the Stone Age. I love playing the drums. But Queens and Foo Fighters are two entirely different types of bands. Queens of the Stone Age are far more experimental and darker and more hard rock, and playing the drums is entirely different to playing the guitar, so there are many, many differences but equally satisfying.

"Playing with Queens was just something that I felt I needed to do after eight years of not playing the drums. I thought I should take a stab at it, and they are the only band in the world that I would do it with."

So what's it like being Mr Multi-purpose? And what if some rate him, like, a really good singer-guitarist but a brilliant drummer?

"It's usually only when I talk to journalists I have to think about something like that," Grohl laughs.

"One of the great things about starting Foo Fighters was that it was for the sake of doing something different. If I had stayed as a drummer in 1994 it would have been too limiting. I would have been confined by this one thing.

"I'm fortunate - I'm one of the few people you can meet that gets to do whatever they want to do all day long, and so if I want to start a band playing trombone next week, maybe I will. But maybe I'm not as good a trombone player as I am a drummer, but I don't care."

Still, Foo Fighters would seem to be on a roll.

They recently headlined the huge Reading Festival in Britain - the gig, says Grohl, shows the strength of the band line-up, which has been stable for the past three years, and the size of their following.

"We were really taken aback by the response and how we pulled it off, we couldn't believe it. It gave us this confidence, this new f****** breath of life. I thought, 'Wow, the last seven or eight years have made a difference. We can come out and do something like that now and it's a trip.'

"It's nice we actually have this confidence now when we walk on stage that we know what we are doing, whereas before it was always a little iffy."

The group remains slightly removed from rock's stylistic shifts and Grohl says that's a good place to be.

"We don't necessarily fit in with a lot of popular music. What most people call rock doesn't really have much to do with the Foo Fighters. We don't have turntables, we don't have tongue piercings and we don't have seven-string guitars tuned down super-low. We are just kind of a rock band and it's very general. And it's a nice place to be, but you have to understand that our ambition is just to make music."

Grohl, who's now 33 (but "alarmed" about his lack of maturity), does feel a certain kinship to the new wave of garage rockers though, even if it's because he knows how exciting it feels for that first burst of success.

"I'd rather have the spotlight on those bands rather than bands who don't necessarily play their instruments, and it's nice to hear raw rock'n'roll. I love the Hives, man. I love the Strokes' record and I really love the White Stripes' record, too. And it's just nice that [they're] real bands playing music, because it seems like in the last four or five years people sort of lost the plot, and they are all young and that's exciting.

"It's exciting to be 21 or 22 years old and have your band on top of the world for doing what it does."

You know the feeling well.

"Yes," says Grohl with an audible smile, remembering the years that Nirvana's Nevermind changed rock. "I've felt that before."

* Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf is out now; Foo Fighters' One by One is released October 24; The Nirvana best-of is due November 12. Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters play at the Big Day Out Friday, January 17.