Foo Fighters are back on the road this month but they’ll be without guitarist Pat Smear for at least some of the dates, after the band revealed that he had been a victim of – no kidding – a “bizarre gardening accident”.
As you might recall, Spinal Tap’s first drummer – John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys, in case you’d forgotten – died in such an incident and the phrase has since become something of a music biz joke. So the Foos decided to break the news of Smear’s mishap by posting a fake National Enquirer-style cover to their Instagram account.
With a pic of a grinning Smear with his foot up giving the camera the finger, it reads: “In the classic tradition of rockstars having bizarre gardening accidents, Pat Smear has apparently rung in the new year by smashing the shit out of his left foot.
“This means he’ll unfortunately be missing a few shows while the multiple broken bones in his foot heal. We’ll miss our beloved Pat as much as you will, but we want him fully healed and back on his feet as soon as possible.”
Deputising for Smear will be “Beck and St Vincent guitar wizard, Jason Falkner,” the band write.
In real life, there is something of a tradition of rockers falling foul of gardening accidents, bizarre or otherwise. In May 2020, Brian May ripped his gluteus maximus (his hip muscle in other words) “to shreds” in what he described as “a moment of over-enthusiastic gardening.”
Rather more seriously, Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro actually died after spraying insecticides in his garden in the early 1990s (though the coroner said that his cause of death was actually a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, rather than an allergic reaction to the pesticides).
Anyway, while Smear gets some rest, the rest of the Foos play Guanajuato this Saturday (10 January), followed by a date at Los Angeles Kia Forum next Wednesday (14 January).
