"This was the moment that changed everything."
Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl has spoken about how a visit to Ireland in the '90s had a profound effect on his life, ultimately leading to the creation of Foo Fighters.
Grohl was left devastated by the death by suicide of bandmate and friend Kurt Cobain in 1994, and took a trip to Ireland, where he had visited years earlier with his mother.
Speaking on the Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio 1 on Friday, Grohl said one moment of his trip in particular galvanised his mind on what he should do.
"It was after Nirvana ended, I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to do, I didn't necessarily want to play music," Grohl said.
"I was young, I think I was 25 years old and I had been to Ireland before and made my way around the Ring of Kerry once before and so I rented a car and wound up driving.
"I flew over and I just started driving around you know just sort of trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life and as I was coming around this country road, I saw a hitchhiker and I thought, you know, he was young and it was sort of raining and I was thinking 'oh I might pick him up'.
"And then as I got closer I noticed he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on and then that was the moment that I realised that I was like, you know, I need to go home and figure this out and that's when I started the Foo Fighters."
In his memoir Dave Grohl: The Storyteller, Grohl revealed that "this was the moment that changed everything".
We imagine he's neither the first nor the last person to have an epiphany while travelling around the glorious Ring of Kerry.
