Foo Fighters fans and friends of the band have been remembering their late drummer Taylor Hawkins on the fourth anniversary of his death.
Hawkins died in 2022 aged 50 just before a scheduled show with the band in Bogotá, Colombia. Multiple drugs including opiates, antidepressants and marijuana were also found in his system at the time of his death.
Rufus Taylor of The Darkness was among the names paying tribute, sharing a video of Hawkins talking about his band and describing him as someone he “loves dearly”. The video was captioned: “4 years. Love you big bro.”
Photographer Sarah Jeynes also shared several photos of him in tribute, including shots of Hawkins on their first meeting in 2005, during which he “offered me his coat because it was cold.” There were also photos from a Maida Vale session in 2019 and a shot taken from the drum rider during Foo Fighters’ headline performance at Reading Festival that same year.
“Oh T. Thinking of you,” she wrote.
Tribute concerts in Hawkins’ honour were held in Los Angeles and London later that year, billed by Dave Grohl as “a gigantic fucking night for a gigantic fucking person”. The show in London was the band’s first public appearance together since the loss of Hawkins and lasted six hours, with an all-star cast including Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde, Liam Gallagher, Brian May and Roger Taylor. Violet Grohl also performed, while Hawkins’ son Shane played drums on ‘My Hero’ with Foo Fighters.
Ronson told NME of Shane and Violet’s inclusion in the show: “The spirit of it felt lovely and appropriate, but what’s amazing is that they really did own it. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, isn’t this sweet. The kids are onstage’. I’ve watched that video of Shane at least 15 times since Saturday. And for Violet to take on Jeff Buckley and Amy Winehouse was fucking brave as hell because the internet can be a fucking shitty place. She really did such an incredible job.”
Meanwhile, Grohl recently said that Hawkins’ death “made me question everything about life”.
Speaking to MOJO, Grohl said that “losing Taylor was never meant to be,” adding: “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life, that it was so unfair. I still have a hard time making sense of it.”
Grohl went on to say that the band had “no plan” to record after Hawkins’ death, but realised that making music was “something we needed to do”. He added that music “had saved us once before”, referencing bandmate Kurt Cobain‘s 1994 death in Nirvana – with Grohl forming The Foos shortly afterwards. The death of Hawkins, as well as the loss of Grohl’s mother Virginia, inspired much of their 2023 album ‘But Here We Are’.
“I think I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel,” he continued, (as per Rolling Stone). “I could have used a bit more of the silence, a bit more of digging deeper. I never want to say music is a distraction, but I was definitely using it as a crutch for some broken limb.”
Grohl has previously opened up about the “complicated” journey to find a new drummer following Hawkins’ death.
A year after Hawkins died, Josh Freese (A Perfect Circle, Nine Inch Nails) became touring drummer with the Foos – until his abrupt departure in May 2025. Ilan Rubin has since become sticksman for the band, having left Nine Inch Nails himself to join the Foos while Freese returned to work with Trent Reznor.
The Foos frontman told Zane Lowe that Hawkins was not only the band’s longtime drummer, but “this incredible spirit. He was this incredible human being and he was our brother. He was our best friend.
“So, continuing after Taylor was really complicated, not just for us, but for any drummer that was going to come in to like, you know, fill his shoes… you know.”
