Source: For Joey, the young guy who gets to sub in for Dave Grohl on one of the Foo Fighters’ best songs, that’s the best night of your life, right there.

Or in Grohl’s words, “Joey’s gonna get some”.

In black shirt, black jeans, long hair and a cheeky grin, Joey McClennan looks pretty much like a shrink-wrapped Grohl, even down to the classic sprint down the middle of the catwalk out into Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium.

“Are you sure you can play it? The last thing you want to do is come up here and shit the bed in front of 40,000 people in your home town,” Grohl teases, before handing over his guitar for Monkey Wrench.

Joey assures Fairfax Media he was not planted in the crowd and had not even soundchecked with the band.

 

“I made a poster last night just hoping that if they saw that I might get the chance,” says the 22-year-old, who credits 2007 hit The Pretender as the reason he plays guitar.”That truly is my biggest dream come true, playing with Fooeys on stage.”For the tens of thousands who aren’t allowed on stage, it’s almost definitely the longest show they’ve been to, and fortunately also pretty damn great.

As Grohl says, they’re going to play some old songs. From the first record, from the second record, from the third record.

“You know we’ve got a lot of f—ing songs, right?” he says.

“You know we’re going to play as long as we f—ing can, right? Until they kick us out of here. Because that’s how we do it.”

It’s an old schtick for those who’ve seen the now-six-piece (plus the “three best f—ing singers in the world” on backing vocals) before but it always goes down a treat.

Foo Fighters, particularly Grohl, have drilled owning stadiums down to a fine art. It’s a healthy dash of humour, a whole bunch of covers and an ever-swelling bag of pure rock songs.

They don’t quite match the three-hour runtime Grohl brags about at the start but it’s close enough.

“You don’t want those two-and-a-half hour shows, do you? That’s some bullshit,” he says.

“You want the show where there’s the guy on the stage saying f—ing stop or I’ll throw you in jail.”

The highlights are mostly when they go off-script, or as off-script as you can when a cauldron full of fans have paid a minimum of a hundred clams to see you walk the same turf as King Wally.

The smile on Grohl’s face is visible even from the very nosebleedy nosebleed section as he plays the call and response game, first with drummer Taylor Hawkins and then the crowd.

They slow and drop to just cowbells before kicking in and out with a force built on two decades of loud-quiet-loud rock.

Who am I kidding? The best bits are when the whole stadium shouts along to My Hero and Everlong as loud as they “f—ing” can. And the covers, including a version of the Beatles’ Blackbird only a few weeks after Paul McCartney played the same song on the same spot. That takes confidence.

Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale joins the band to play David Bowie’s role in the Queen classic Under Pressure, sings pretty well but looks more youthfully excited to be on stage than Joey.

But really, that cover is all about Hawkins, Grohl’s “spirit animal … soulmate … drummer from another mother” with vocal pipes that have no right belonging to a drummer.

Alice Cooper, the Ramones and even the drum intro from Down Underall get sound checked.

The only downside of a Foo Fighters show is the tendency it has to highlight a cliched truth. The new stuff isn’t quite as good as the classics.

While every newer album, with the exception of Concrete and Gold, is perfectly listenable in its own right, songs such as Congregation, Sunday Rain and even to a lesser extent Let it Die and Arlandria don’t quite stack up next to the older gems.

Far from being a placeholder for the headliners, support act Weezer have more than their fair share of fans in the cavernous stadium earlier in the night.

From El Scorcho to Island in the Sun, they bring their A-game and deliver a set that hits all the right notes.