Dave Grohl shares his guilty pleasure songs with Foo Fighters frontman noting girl band classic and viral 2010s track

Dave Grohl has shared two of his guilty-pleasure songs, including a girl-band classic apparently loved by one of his Nirvana bandmates.

The Foo Fighters frontman has gone on record with some bold favourite song choices over the years. His love of pop music is well-documented, with Grohl attesting that at least one song from a powerhouse UK girl group is one of his favourites. The release of Spice in 1996 prompted Grohl to share his love of the Spice Girls‘ single, When 2 Become 1. He said in 2001: “I couldn’t get this song out of my head, and it’s not even a dance song it’s just this slow love shit.

“Lord I love it I don’t know what to do! In Nirvana, Krist Novoselic joked that he was going to call his autobiography What The Hell Was I Thinking? Now I know what he means. Do I need a shrink?” Over a decade on from the admission of a Spice Girls hit being one of his favourite songs, Grohl was on hand again to sing the praises of an unlikely songwriter.

The viral sensation Psy, who shot to fame with Gangnam Style back in 2012, managed to catch the attention of the Foo Fighters frontman. Grohl told the audience in an SXSW speech in 2013 that the song had become one of his favourites from that decade.

He said: “I can truthfully say out loud that ‘Gangnam Style’ is one of my favourite songs of the past decade.” Grohl would, in a separate interview, share an album that had long been his “favourite”.

Paris, Texas offered Grohl his most beloved album, with the drummer-turned-frontman suggesting the film’s soundtrack could not be bettered. The Nirvana and Foo Fighters member would suggest the playing of Ry Cooder was what sold him on the album, and what makes it one of his favourites. Grohl would speak with GQ about the songs and musicians he admired most, with the Paris, Texas soundtrack seemingly inspiring Grohl.

He said: “There is an instrumental record by an American legend named Ry Cooder. He scored a 1984 movie called Paris, Texas in the ’80s, and the soundtrack to that film is my favourite album of all time.”

Cooder himself would go on to discuss his work on the soundtrack. He said: “[Wenders] did a very good job at capturing the ambience out there in the desert, just letting the microphones and the Nagra machine roll and get tones and sound from the desert itself, which I discovered was E-flat, was in the key of E-flat – that’s the wind, you know, was nice. So we tuned everything to E-flat.”

Grohl would go on to praise Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, adding: “It’s that sort of fearlessness that I respect most in musicians, not perfection or any sort of clean technical proficiency. I really like to see musicians right on the edge of falling apart. He did that in the most beautiful way.”