Taylor Swift may be a Lover, but Dave Grohl is a Foo Fighter. The frontman of the rock group made disparaging comments about Swift onstage over the weekend, while both artists played shows in the same city.
Both Swift and the Foo Fighters performed in London, Swift on her record-breaking Eras Tour and the Foo Fighters on their Everything or Nothing At All Tour—or, as Grohl called it in his remarks, “The Errors Tour.”
During Saturday’s show at London Stadium, Grohl acknowledged that Swift was playing just a few miles away at Wembley Stadium that very night.
“I know that she’s on her Eras Tour. I’m telling you, man, you don’t want to suffer the wrath of Taylor Swift,” he said. “So we like to call our tour the Errors Tour because I feel like, we’ve had more than a few eras, and more than a few fucking errors as well. Just a couple.”
Sounds pretty self-deprecating and harmless, yes? If he’d stopped there, sure. But he didn’t: “That’s because we actually play live. What?!”
After his jokey indignation, he said, “I’m just saying, you guys like raw, live rock ‘n’ roll music right? You came to the right fucking place.”
The thing is, he’s not the first to make the Eras/Errors pun: The Swifties did it first. Just take a look at one of the many compilations of onstage oopsies from Swift’s long-running tour that fall under the umbrella, including booger checks, costume mishaps, guitar string breaks (not really something that happens without playing live, for what it’s worth), and more. So, strike one.
And then there’s the fact that Swift has bailed Grohl out with her music, by his own telling. In a 2018 appearance on James Corden’s Late Late Show, Grohl recounted Swift coming to his rescue at a party hosted by Paul McCartney. The evening reached its “now sing a song!” portion, with Grohl at its center, but there was a problem that risked Grohl looking a Foo(l): “I can’t play piano, and I was a little out of sorts at that point,” he said. “And all the guitars are left-handed and I’m, ‘Oh my God, what do I do, what do I do.’”
Doom!
Except…
“Right at that moment Taylor Swift stands up,” he continued. “She goes, ‘I’ll do a song!’ and…she saved my ass. She gets up, and she starts playing this song and it sounds familiar and I’m kind of a little bit out of it, and I’m looking at my wife like, ‘I know this song. What is this song?’ And she was playing the Foo Fighters song ‘Best of You.’” Once Grohl managed to recognize his own song, he joined in and sang with Swift.
As for that “wrath” that Grohl mentioned, he’s seen before how outspoken impassioned Swifties can be when they feel the singer has been unfairly disparaged. Earlier this year, Grohl’s daughter Violet, who was 17 at the time, posted negative comments about Swift’s use of private jets on social media and was met with a barrage of backlash from Swift’s fans. She eventually deleted the comments.
One might say that his Saturday onstage comments did not represent the best of him. Maybe he was just bummed that he had zero heirs to the British throne at his show, compared to Swift’s three?
For her part, Swift made a pointed comment during her Sunday show that could be interpreted as a rebuttal of Grohl’s remarks, thanking her band during the concert for “playing live for you for three and a half hours tonight.”
Representatives for the Foo Fighters and for Taylor Swift did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.