The new Foo Fighters clip dropped today, and along with a beautiful hand-crafted storybook setting, it also stars two girls who may or may not be familiar to Foo Fighters fans: Dave Grohl’s daughters.
Chatting with Rolling Stone about the clip for their new single ‘The Sky Is A Neighbourhood’, Dave reveals that, rather than prodding his daughters into show business, the girls had always been keen to be in the band’s earlier clips, so he thought he’d bring them on board for their on-screen debut.
“This video was special to me because I got to direct two of my daughters,” Grohl said. “They’ve seen me make videos before and they’ve watched the process and always asked, ‘When can we be in the video? When can we be in the video?'”
“They’re like creative consultants,” he added. “I’ll explain a video to them, and they’ll say, ‘Dad, you should do this…’ and I wind up using their ideas in my videos. They’re both brilliant kids with really outside ideas. So when I asked them if they wanted to be in the video, they were so excited. And I said, “Okay, you guys realize, you’re gonna have to levitate, right?” And they couldn’t fucking wait.
“We had to put them in these harnesses and they were suspended by these wires. And to them it was like an amusement park ride. They just felt like they were on swings at a carnival. And I’m standing on top of this cabin yelling down at them, ‘Are you guys okay?’ They’re like, ‘YEAH! Let’s GO!'”
Watch Dave Grohl’s daughters star in the Foo Fighters’ new clip for ‘The Sky Is A Neighbourhood’
Sounds like a pretty fun way to spend the day with your kids, and he compared the whole process of filming the video to the imaginary games they’d play at home, saying “Kids have wild imaginations, and mine definitely do, so it’s not hard to get them to imagine they’re in some fantastic situation.”
It’s also pretty clear that, unlike Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo’s bass prodigy son Tye – who recently played a whole run of shows as the temporary bassist for Korn – Dave Grohl’s daughters don’t quite look up to their dad in exactly the same way – at least, not when it comes to his status as a rock icon.
“You have to realize that my children don’t see me as famous rock musician,” Grohl says. “They see me as a slobbish dad and especially when it comes to a director… It’s funny, they were much more cooperative making the video than they are when it’s time for them to clean their room or go to bed.
Unlike some celebrity kids who seem to be groomed to follow in their parents’ footsteps from an early age, they also don’t have any plans to go into showbiz any time soon.
“Our life at home is very low key,” Grohl says. “There’s not a whole lot of that kind of ambition at the Grohls’ residence. They’re kids. They like to skateboard and ride scooters and ride horses and watch YouTube videos of people making slime. I don’t think that they’re looking forward to a life on the screen.”
The cosmic clip was apparently inspired in part by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and also by Grohl’s bizarre dreams of UFOs he had twenty years ago, which you can read about in the full interview.
Along with their mates QOTSA, Foo Fighters are hoping to “take over the fucking world together” with their upcoming album Concrete and Gold, which even features the legendary Paul McCartney playing drums along with some other big-name guests that are yet to be revealed.
