Foo Fighters: One Love.

The Foo Fighters play the Big Day Out at the Gold Coast Parklands on January 19. One By One is in stores now.

It's pretty easy to lose faith in music when you're a cynical street press ho, when most of your days are spent chatting to the next, forgettable pop bimbette, when the hyped albums you're told to covet end up being thoughtless regurgitations of classic 60s and 70s riffs, recorded by kids born in the 1980s.

So it was with a heavy heart that I waited for the next Foo Fighters album. In these days of no heroes, it's easy to expect little to nothing from anyone. Then I heard One By One, on a shitty cassette, the same shitty cassette that I'm listening to as I write this, and I realised that my musical heart would still beat.

I too, can still be a fan. Is it too hackneyed to say it is by far their greatest recording? Is it too pompous to say rock is undergoing a renaissance? The trinity of Foo Fighters, Queens Of The Stone Age and Tenacious D are re-writing stoner rock. You can have your Hives and your Vines and your Strokes... give me the men who have weathered the highs and lows of rock, have eked out their own sound, their own niche that still nods it's head to all that has come before. Dave Grohl, who is, by his own admission still "screaming his balls off the whole time" and band mates Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel and newish initiate Chris Shiflett have gone back to school with One By One, while Grohol's trademark song-verse, screamed chorus methodology still gets a work out, so does a late 80s, B52's meets Cheap Trick aesthetic. Is it heavier? Yes, is it more romantic? Yes, does it rock like fucking nothing else? Hell yes!

Guitarist Chris Shiflett is unwinding in a Melbourne hotel room at the time of our chat, doing some press and preparing for a late night appearance on Rove, our lame Letterman I tell him teasingly. Sounding fresh and relaxed, the tone of all band mates has been surprisingly positive and enthusiastic, a reflection of happiness with the finished product, and for four blokes that could very easily release crap and still have people buy that crap and grin, that's no mean feat.

He concedes that One By One was in very real danger of coming out sounding like an entirely different recording. In fact, an entirely different album did exist.

"It's really good the way things turned out," drawls Shiflett, "It didn't always seem like it was gonna turn out that way. We worked on this record for four months. We entered with the completely wrong approach and tried to make a very clinical, perfect precise record, and it didn't really work. It didn't really sound good, it didn't sound like the band and it was too slick... if we had have put that record out, we wouldn't be so happy right now. Luckily we're in a position where we have the luxury of going 'We don't like this, we don't want to put it out. We're gonna take a break'. Dave went and did Queens Of The Stone Age, we all went and did our thing and then got back together and made a record really quickly, it was a raw approach and we didn't try to over-analyse it and didn't try to over-produce it, and now we've got something we're really happy with. Which is great cause there were a couple of weeks there where it didn't look so good, we were all questioning what we were doing, are we breaking up? What are we doing?  I didn't know what the hell was going on...so the end result is great, it was an interesting road to get there."

Part of the success of the Foo Fighters, that Nirvana millstone notwithstanding, is that these guys actually like each other, and it wasn't until recently that any scandal rocked the good ship Foo. What is the most surprising is how reluctant the music media is to write anything negative about everyone's favourite nice guy Dave Grohl... I mean, this is the man whose three biggest saga's were Kurt, that infamous scooter incident at the Big Day Out and his support for controversial political groups. So it was a surprise to many when they found out that during the groups hiatus, drummer and blonde poster boy Taylor wound up over-indulging on the recreational tip and had to spend some time in hospital. Like Chris says, what didn't kill the group made them closer.

"It's funny when all that shit happened, I thought that music magazines would leap on it and make a thing out of it and nobody did. It was really...it was kinda nice. Thing's came out a little later, but at the time, nobody seemed to...they didn't know or they didn't make a big thing about it."

I put this down to the strange fact that the bulk of music journo's, while they might not like Dave's music, genuinely respect him as a man. Who else could come out the other side of Nirvanagate and smell of roses? And now there's a new Nirvana song... sheesh.

"Dave's like the most down to earth, normal guy you can imagine. To meet him, if you didn't know who Nirvana was, you'd never guess that this guy had been in that band, it was the biggest band in the world, it touched so many people, but he just doesn't carry himself like that.”

At the time of this chat, the group were in town for two days, I expressed dismay that the quartet were not coming to Briz Vegas. "Well, this isn't a tour, it's a promo trip, we're coming back next year for the Big Day Out... were gonna try and keep Dave off those scooters. We can't wait to come back, we love Australia, how could you not?"