Under doctor's orders: Foo Fighters' Medicine At Midnight

Full disclosure: this is the first time I’ve ever attempted to review a Foo Fighters album, and I’m somewhat apprehensive. Not because there are people I know who worship the very ground “ver Foos” walk on, or because I have friends who loathe the very idea of the band. No, it’s because they’re a bona fide rawk-and-roll group who, on an interplanetary scale, are gargantuan and yet still hard to know where they are pitched. 

They’ve been with us for more than 25 years, releasing ten albums in that time, a length of service and respondent following that is comparable with the great legends of classic heavy rock whose DNA clearly courses through the Foos’ veins. They are a Major Stadium Band, with Dave Grohl generally thought of as the Nicest Man In Rock™. Some fans lust after him, others just want to hang out with him in the blokey sense. Indeed such is Grohl's avuncularity - and, indeed, that of all six Foos - that he can eff-and-blind his way through gigs and still have grannies digging him, even the songs on which he screams his vocals. 

There is, then, something polished about the Foo Fighters. Yes, the music has an edge, but it’s cultivated. If you turn down the volume a notch, they offer comfortable rock and roll, ideal for mass arm-waving summer festival singalongs. The brothers Gallagher would probably baulk at this, but at times the Foo Fighters' music resembled an Americanised Oasis. In some respects they are the Three Bears of rock - the bowl of porridge that is 'just' right. But there is a nagging sense with me of ‘So what?’. Nice band, a few catchy daytime rock radio staples, but nothing artistically groundbreaking. Like the Volkswagen Golf, nicely designed, superbly constructed and brilliantly executed, but, you know…

Which begs the question: will their new album, Medicine At Midnight, do anything for the doubters or, equally, for the already confirmed? Well, let’s start with its premise. Grohl says that, for their tenth album and 25th anniversary (last year, when they were originally intending to release it), they wanted to do something different. “When you look back at all the records we've made in the last 25 years, it's like 'OK, we've done the noisy punk rock crap... We've done the sleepy acoustic stuff...,” Grohl explained to Radio.com. “We've done the three-and-a-half minute-long, fun pop-rock song. Hard rock, heavy stuff...‘What's the one thing we haven't done?’. I was like, ‘You know we haven't made our David Bowie's Let's Dance record. We haven't made the Stones' Tattoo You or, like, a Power Station record. We haven't made a rock band record that you could shake your ass to.”

So, instead of making some mellow AOR record, Grohl thought they’d make a party album. “A lot of our favourite records have these big grooves and riffs,” he told the NME. “I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album.” Wait - a party album? Well, yes. “It was written and sequenced in a way that you put on, and nine songs later you’ll just put it on again,” says Grohl. So let’s see if that’s the outcome. 

When it was released in November, lead-in single Shame Shame gave some hint at Medicine At Midnight’s direction of travel, with its pizzicato strings, bass riff and Taylor Hawkins’ hi-hat-heavy drum pattern seemingly drawing on the aforementioned Power Station. It is, however, arguably the album's weakest track, and for all its pleasantry, doesn’t really represent the party vibe Grohl speaks of. Far better is the track preceding it, Making A Fire which kicks off the album with a bright blast of happy-clappy, na-na-na-na-chorused drive up Pacific Coast Highway on a gloriously sunny day.

When it does come, the Bowie reference is not immediately obvious. Midway through the album, the title track opens up with an ambience that does indeed appear to emulate that of the sonics found on Let's Dance. By the time of its funk-blues guitar solo, which bears a strong resemblance to Stevie Ray Vaughan's on the Bowie hit, the reference is complete. You can sort of seeing where Grohl is coming from, even if it's also a good soundbite on his part. The better reference point, in my opinion, is indeed The Power Station, that mid-80s supergroup formed by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor and John Taylor with Robert Palmer and Tony Thompson, the former Chic drummer, working with producer Bernard Edwards, who co-created Chic with - guess who? - Nile Rodgers, Bowie's arch-collaborator on Lets Dance. Perhaps now I get it, but it would be a stretch to say that Bowie/Rodgers' influence courses through the sonic framework of the album as a whole. Cloudspotter might have a trace about it, but only a trace, and Making A Fire does contain some funk chops (Grohl says it's rooted in Sly & The Family Stone).

However, this album is not a discoification of the Foo Fighters’ stock-in-trade. For the most part, Medicine At Midnight it grown-up heavyish rock, with plenty of riffing by the guitar triumvirate of Grohl, Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett. Holding The Poison is almost Foo-by-numbers. There are mellower moments, such as Chasing Birds and the gently reflective Waiting On A War, which recalls the shared childhood of, I think, all of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear threat. Coming four tracks in, it diverts from the party spirit somewhat, but affords the opportunity Grohl to expound on the modern-day risk of global conflict, a thought triggered by his daughter one day while out in the car. It does, however, evolve into the closest thing on this record to the bombastic stadium stompers that blasted them into rock’s top tier to begin with. In similar vein there’s No Son Of Mine (no, not a Genesis cover…), apparently a tribute to the late Lemmy of Motörhead and, yes, it does resemble Ace of Spades, a song which, if you think about it, actually provides part of the Foo Fighters' original blueprint.

There is no known music lore that dictates how long any album should be: Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On clocks in at 35 minutes; Elton John’s classic early 70s trio of Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water and Honky Château all ran to no more than three-quarters of an hour apiece; the record for shortest album is probably still held by The Beach Boys’ Wild Honey, a miserly 23 minutes and 58 seconds. So, at 37 minutes long, it’s hard to see what kind of party Grohl had in mind when he cast Medicine At Midnight as the soundtrack of a romping night in. But, then, given modern attention spans, an album you can listen to in the time it takes for my lunchtime constitutional is not that unusual. “So we picked the nine songs that we really enjoyed and thought, ‘Great.’ Okay, it’s 37 minutes,” he recently told The Irish Times, pointing out that to his teenage daughter “37 minutes would be like Gandhi or War And Peace.”

So, to describe the Foo Fighters' celebration of a quarter-century as a functioning musical entity as some sort of liberating milestone would be a misnomer. But you can see what Dave Grohl means. He also knows that the band could, simply, keep on pumping out clones of My Hero or Best Of You, just to keep their hardcore fans happy. In truth, Medicine At Midnight doesn’t stray all that far from the formula, but nor does it slip on trademark quality. This band may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s nothing here that’s really not to like. And right now, that’s no bad thing.

1971: the year it all began

Ask anyone who knows their Elvis C from their Elvis P and you will never reach any consensus on when pop music was at its most vibrant.

For every proponent of 1954 (the year Presley invented rock and roll by recording That's Alright Mama at Sun Studios), there will be another to champion 1964 (the year Beatlemania exploded in America). The Beatles also have a claim on 1966, the year they released Revolver, which included Tomorrow Never Knows, the track that for so many reasons probably changed the course of music more than any other.

Move on to 1977 and the arrival of punk, 1982 and Thriller, The Smiths' This Charming Man and New Order's Blue Monday a year later, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit in '92, Britpop in '95 - I could go on, but we'll never, ever, reach any conclusion. But if there is one year which, simply because of the volume of milestone releases, is inescapably more significant than most others it's 1971.

Music journalist, Smash Hits co-founder and former Whistle Test presenter David Hepworth came to this conclusion four years ago when, having previously noted how much of an annus mirabilis (in his words) it had been, he compiled a 121-track Spotify playlist from the albums released that year (also published in this blog post).

It is likely that you and I will beg to differ on just how much these were landmark songs, or even whether those making were any bigger than anyone since, but when you look at the compilation - below - of albums released in 1971, it's inescapable that this year in particular witnessed momentum unlike any other in pop history.

• Led Zeppelin - IV
• David Bowie - Hunky Dory
• The Who - Who's Next
• Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
• T-Rex - Electric Warrior
• The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
• Carole King - Tapestry
• Paul McCartney - Ram
• John Lennon - Imagine
• Elton John - Madman Across The Water
• Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
• Faces - A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse
• The Doors - LA Woman
• Joni Mitchell - Blue
• Stevie Wonder - Where I'm Coming From
• Genesis - Nursery Cryme
• Pink Floyd - Meddle
• Jethro Tull - Aqualung
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus
• King Crimson - Islands
• Nick Drake - Bryter Later
• John Martyn - Bless The Weather
• James Taylor - Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon
• Rory Gallagher - Rory Gallagher
• Humble Pie - Rockin' The Filmore
• ZZ Top - ZZ Top's First Album
• Yes - The Yes Album
• Earth, Wind & Fire - Earth, Wind & Fire
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - 4 Way Street
• Don McLean - American Pie

I may have been four years old at the time (though I believe I was already in possession of my first album, Songs From Chigley And Trumpton), but almost half a century on, it would be hard not to regard Led Zeppelin IV as one of the most important rock albums of all time, or Hunky Dory as the album that created David Bowie, the songwriting from S to F of Who's Next, What's Going On's social commentary, McCartney and Lennon's solo albums breaking out of The Beatles' shadow, Carole King's landmark Tapestry (which she'll be performing in full this summer in London), and even Stevie Marriott and Pete Frampton defining the live album for years to come with Humble Pie's ear wax bothering Rockin' The Filmore.

In his excellent new book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment, Hepworth has returned to chronologically explore 12-months that bore “more influential albums than any year before or since”. From the outset, he states the case that 1971 wasn't just an extraordinary year for releases, but effectively the start of the rock era. Of course, it wasn't exactly Year Zero: rock had emerged when Chuck Berry cranked up his Gibson for the first time, and was then followed by The Beatles, the Stones, The Kinks, The Who, the Beach Boys and myriad others blurring and stretching the boundaries of pop and rock in the 60s. But Hepworth's argument - which is bang on the money - was that '71 established the longevity with which these artists would endure, in many cases long after their peak, and in some cases as we push on into the new millennium, long after they've left us.

Starting from New Year's Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney effectively wound up the Fabs, Hepworth writes that the next day would herald "the busiest, most creative, most innovative, most interesting and longest-resounding year of that era". To support his argument, he doesn't just trawl the albums and the stories behind them, but provides context, too - the political and economic environments of the early 1970s, the cultural emancipation that teenagers enjoyed in the 60s that endured into the 70s as owning records became as affordable a hobby as creating bubblegum cards had been in childhood.

There was, also, the attraction of the form itself - the gatefold sleeves, the Hipgnosis and Roger Dean artwork - but more importantly, the lack of other distractions which inhibits attention to the long-form recording today. In 1971, youths didn't have iPhones and iTunes, PlayStations or even their own TV sets. Immersing oneself in two sides of a 43-minute album (or four if it was a prog act's latest overblown double) was an escape from the grey skies and prevailing austerity outside if you were in Britain, or the horrors of being at war in Vietnam if you were American.

Even if, now, you might consider the 23 minutes of Echoes that consumed the entire second half of Floyd's Echoes, or the eight-minute duration of Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven, grossly over-indulgent or patronisingly "of their time" on the part of the bands, it would be churlish in the extreme to dismiss their virtuosity, and that, Hepworth suggests, underpins the richness of what appeared in 1971. This was was the year, he asserts, that the rock era truly began. But it was also the year when pure creativity and raw talent, before many of these artists ascended into superstardom, and then descended into drug-addled mediocrity later in the decade.

Hepworth notes how this was a time when bands were able to do more or less what they wanted to, artistically, but they did so on the back of paying their dues. More or less every one of these landmark albums was a product of artists who performed relentlessly, using gigs in provincial ballrooms and university refectories to hone material before committing it to the studio, before going out on tour again with the new album and developing even more material for the next recording - which might even appear in the same year.

Old heads like me will have an inbuilt interest in Hepworth's tome, even though, at 48, I've clearly come to the releases of 1971 retrospectively. But as the owner of a good 90% of the albums listed above, I've come to them as modern classics, as vital to my cultural development as reading 1984, The Catcher In The Rye, On The Road or Hamlet.

I may have come to Bowie via Ashes To Ashes, but it proved to be essential to go back to the very beginning to see how he progressed from Hunky Dory through Ziggy and all the other guises to reach the 1980s. As a Beatle fan, I was compelled to find out what happened next, and with Lennon being tragically taken from us in 1980, listening to Imagine, released nine years before, became part of the mourning process. I was introduced to Genesis via Follow You, Follow Me, a love song, but was intrigued by Nursery Cryme and the frankly dark goings on in The Musical Box. You could even argue that with so many hip-hop artists sampling Bonzo's drums on When The Levee Breaks (recorded in a toilet at Headley Grange for its unique acoustics), 1971's tail has stretched long into the subsequent decades.

In 2011, on the 40th anniversary release of 1971's Aqualung by Jethro Tull, my friend and contemporary Steven Wilson - who had just remixed the album - told Classic Rock magazine that he thought that by '71 the record industry had finally recognised that rock music was an art form. "There seems to be something leading up to 1971," Wilson said, "which is when record labels started to get interested. That's usually when scenes start to die, but I think you can see 1971 as the zenith of creative expression for experimental music. The records were still very ambitious after that, but there's something about the spirit of '71 that was special."

In chronicling, month-by-month, the major albums released in 1971, Hepworth doesn't just present a giant coincidence, but perhaps by coincidence, the year's progress tells a story (as Hepworth relays) that began with The Beatles breaking up and ended with Don McClean's American Pie telling a tale of loss of innocence.

1971 was, then, a year of profound confluence, a year in which the album, itself, found its place as one of the most important artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema; in which the groundwork done by Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper created the album artist as a thing in its own right. It was the year in which the music business began tapping into rock music for the next decade or two, at least, as its great money spinner.

So, if you have any interest in what happened along the way, then you'll want to know what fired the starting gun. Hepworth expertly dusts the trigger for prints with 1971: Never A Dull Moment, compiling a fascinating, entertaining and revealing examination of rock music's genetic structure from the events of the year which, arguably, brought it all together.