Foo Fighters Live In Manchester Review: Small show delivers stadium-sized thrills

Foo Fighters

O2 Ritz, Manchester Friday, February 27, 2026

The war cry is familiar, but the battleground is not. “Are you fucking ready!?” wails Dave Grohl as he introduces The Pretender early on tonight, taking in a Manchester audience that is radically smaller than he is used to commanding in this particular city. For a band accustomed to strutting around the Etihad Stadium, even the Co-Op Live or AO Arena would have constituted a significant underplay for Foo Fighters, but the 1,500 capacity O2 Ritz? This is a great white shark in a goldfish bowl scenario. “Stadium hands, let’s pretend!” Grohl jokes at one point, encouraging the sardine-packed crowd to sway in unison. Not that this flight of fancy is required. Any notion that this final date of intimate shows promoting the Foos’ forthcoming album, Your Favorite Toy, would capture them in a more understated fashion is trounced from the off. They open with a riotous This Is A Call at 11.16pm on Friday night. They reluctantly vacate the stage at 1.31am, Saturday morning. What happens in between is a loud, joyful blur.

Armed as they are with so many songs hardwired for stadia, Foos make quick and easy work of the Ritz. With the bouncing jangle of This Is A Call dispatched, a frenetic All My Life soon sends the crowd into convulsions. Times Like These – introduced in extremely nail-on-head fashion by Grohl with the words, “Times Like These motherfuckers, let’s go right now!” – quickly follows suit. As hit follows hit, and with no stadium runways to tread or far away pockets of fans to engage, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a much more muscular, streamlined Foos experience than their stadium iteration. They are locked in. Rarely, for example, has Walk’s “I never wanna die!” refrain been so convincingly delivered – Grohl’s finger wagging in the air in a manner less rockstar, more Baptist minister mid-sermon.

What should not be taken for granted amid the onslaught of favourites like Learn To Fly and Monkey Wrench is that there are songs that, on paper at least, shouldn’t be able to hold their own against such beloved anthems. But they do. La Dee Da from 2017’s Concrete And Gold is enhanced not only by Grohl’s piercing screaming, but the sight of him dousing the front row in water. Likewise, 2021’s No Son Of Mine – deftly spliced tonight with Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades – carries much more weight than on record. Helping in this regard, too, is new recruit Ilan Rubin on drums. A tornado of curly hair and thrashing limbs behind the kit, he lives up to his formidable reputation during a scorching rendition of White Limo and an extended jam sequence in Run. Likewise, Jason Falkner does an excellent job deputising for Pat Smear on guitar, as their perma-smiling talisman recovers from breaking his foot in a “bizarre gardening accident”.

Nothing proves more indicative of just how easy Foo Fighters bend the Ritz to their will than These Days. With the crowd taking over the vocal duties for Grohl, he eventually has to intervene to point out that they are stuck in a loop. “I love it when you sing our songs, but that’s not the correct arrangement,” he chides. He is promptly greeted with a playful Mancunian boo. “Sorry!” he shrugs. “I’ll sing with you, do you wanna know the next part? It goes like this…” It is but one of many times tonight Grohl’s star wattage shines exceptionally bright – others include a story about the time Ozzy Osbourne used his toilet and the moment he silences the whole venue during Monkey Wrench just so everyone can hear one fan scream because they looked like they were really going for it.

Elsewhere tonight, Foos run through their discography with a fine-tooth comb. Among the gems allotted “for the old-school motherfuckers” is the gargantuan, downtuned heft of Stacked Actors. Hey, Johnny Park! from 1997’s The Colour And The Shape – a song that has been criminally underserved on tours over the years – also makes a particularly loud claim to graduate to a setlist mainstay from now on. Sadly, but perhaps understandably, all material from their excellent 2023 outing But Here We Are – which tackled the deaths of Taylor Hawkins and Grohl’s mother Virginia – is omitted. A beautiful performance of Aurora is, however, dedicated to their late drummer.

There is also a new era of the band to usher in tonight. No space is afforded for Your Favorite Toy’s lead single Asking For A Friend, but there is the unreleased Of All People, a riot of choppy guitars and soaring vocals that may soon become a fan favourite. Also impressing is YFT’s title track which finds its best expression live – its bratty “Nyah-nyah-nyah” opening lyrics carrying more snarl, more venom when delivered by a singer who, by this point, looks like he just took a shower fully clothed. Printed on the setlist but not played is A320, a gorgeous aerophobic curio taken from the 1998 Godzilla Soundtrack (no, seriously) which was recently resurrected live for the first time since 2000. Its omission tonight would sting a lot more were there not something even better waiting in the encore once Best Of You – replete with the usual football stadium “ooooh oh-oh” chants from the crowd – is done.

“Thirty fucking years ago, we always used to end all of our shows with this song,” smiles Grohl. “To us? This is always the best way to end the night.” So it is that the first of a two-song farewell starts with Exhausted – the final track from their self-titled debut record. According to Setlist FM, it has only been played 148 times across their three-decades-and-counting existence as a band. A frazzled serenade of fuzz fit to make J Mascis nod in approval, it offers a poignant reminder of this band in its fledgling days, and the pain, confusion and bereavement it was born from. As it nears its end, Grohl is hunched by his amp, conjuring feedback, lost in his own world. This is not the feel-good anthem encores are typically made of, and it is all the more interesting for it. Exhausted is, in fact, the best song aired tonight by some distance.

It makes for a neat one-two punch when combined with set closer Everlong. If Exhausted glimpses the baby band the Foos once were, Everlong offers a stark reminder of the giants they became. It would normally end with fireworks shooting out above a stadium into the night sky, but such pyrotechnics were always surplus to requirements for a song of this calibre. “Thanks everybody, that was fucking fun,” Grohl says, by way of adieu. “Thanks for the memories.” Indeed. Foo Fighters play bigger shows than this all of the time. It is unlikely that they play many better ones.

Foo Fighters, O2 Ritz, Manchester, February 27, 2026, Set List:

This Is A Call

All My Life

Times Like These

The Pretender

La Dee Da

Stacked Actors

These Days

Walk

My Hero

Learn To Fly

Your Favorite Toy

No Son Of Mine

Run

Aurora

White Limo

Of All People

Monkey Wrench

Hey, Johnny Park!

Best Of You

Encore:

Exhausted

Everlong

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