Everlong

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Directed by Michel Gondry the music video for ‘Everlong’ is a surrealistic take on Sam Raimi’s supernatural horror film The Evil Dead.  “When he first explained it to me it took him half an hour to explain the treatment” Grohl said of Gondry’s vision. “The original idea was crazier than what we ended up doing. He wanted us to be like half man, half machine superhero people. Nate would have had two eye patches”.

The original concept also featured Daryl Hannah as the female love interest, but this idea was, according to Dave, nixed by his then girlfriend, and backing vocalist on the track, Louse Post. “That’s why we made Taylor dress up like a girl”, he joked. According to Taylor he was “coerced into it”, jokingly claiming that “They decided if one of the guys in the band was going to do it, I'd make the prettiest girl.”

Whilst Hawkins admitted it was not his first foray into cross dressing, having done so for a couple of past Halloween costumes, it wasn’t something he made a habit of and expressed wonderment how women did it – “it's not like I sit at home in women's clothing. I don't know how you do it - the clothes are really uncomfortable, pantyhose and bras and stuff. I don't know how you put on lipstick and drink beer without it all coming off or getting all over the place. It's really high maintenance to look beautiful”.

Even as filming commenced Grohl was still struggling to understand the vision, especially due to the common practice of not shooting scenes in order. “I remember as we were doing it, we were shooting all these scenes out of sequence, and I had no idea what we were doing. When we first saw it, I remember thinking ‘is this any good, it’s kind of weird’. But everyone else loved it, so I thought OK”.

This was the first Foo Fighters video where a different edit of the song was used instead of the regular album version. To accommodate the full vision for the video, an extra reprise of the final chorus was repeated following a tape rewind effect, extending the runtime by approximately 39 seconds over the original recording.