Since the tragic death of Taylor Hawkins earlier this year, musicians from across the spectrum have offered up tributes to the legendary Foo Fighters drummer.
They include Wolfgang Van Halen, who delivered an emotional cover of My Hero at a gig in March; Pearl Jam, who played a rendition of Cold Day in the Sun at a recent Los Angeles show; and Paul McCartney, who labeled the drummer a “true rock and roll hero”.
But a new tribute by musical collective the Rockin' 1000 might just be the most spectacular yet.
Filling the stadium floor at a recent show at Paris's Stade de France, the group – comprising 1,008 musicians, hundreds of which were playing electric guitar – gave a fittingly larger-than-life tribute to the late drummer with a rendition of The Colour and the Shape cut My Hero.
The Rockin' 1000 project has a direct link to Foo Fighters in that it was set up by founder Fabio Zaffagnini in 2015 in order to attract the band to play a show in his hometown of Cesena, Italy.
After swiftly recruiting 1,000 musicians, Zaffagnini recorded a video of the group playing Learn to Fly – from 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose – which eventually led the Dave Grohl-led rock institution to play a show in the city that same November.
During the Cesena show, Zaffagnini was crowd-surfed towards the stage after the band performed My Hero, where he made a speech to the crowd sitting atop Grohl's Game of Thrones-esque guitar-themed stage throne.
Since then, the Rockin' 1000 project has grown, recording its first live album, That's Live, in Cesena in 2016 – including a performance of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit – and playing at the Artemio Franchi Stadium in Florence, Italy in 2018, joined for three songs by Courtney Love.
The collective's recent show at the Stade de France also included covers of Guns N' Roses' Paradise City, AC/DC's Hells Bells, David Bowie's Space Oddity, Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name, The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army and more.
