Though their music spans four decades, Them Crooked Vultures have similar musical influences rooted in blues-based rock. Photo / Supplied by Maria Robinson

Though their music spans four decades, Them Crooked Vultures have similar musical influences rooted in blues-based rock. Photo / Supplied by Maria Robinson

Dave Grohl has declared Them Crooked Vultures his dream band line-up, which makes you wonder how the other Foo Fighters are feeling - and exactly what Nirvana meant to him. Meanwhile, his bandmate Josh Homme, the frontman for Queens of the Stone Age and singer and guitarist in TCV, has been typically low-key about his take on the supergroup.

The band's other main player, John Paul Jones, who was bass player and multi-instrumentalist for Led Zeppelin, is a little less gushing than Grohl but he's excited.

"It's way up there," he says on the phone from Los Angeles about where TCV sit alongside Led Zeppelin and the many other bands and musical projects he's been involved during his 45-year career.

Although, Jones jokes, he hasn't actually been in many bands - TCV is the second after Led Zeppelin which dissolved in 1980 following the death of drummer John Bonham. But he's released a number of solo albums and been in demand working with everyone from REM and Paul McCartney to the Foo Fighters and Butthole Surfers since then.

"But the bands I have been in have been bloody good," he chuckles wryly. "It's the same sort of excitement that I felt in the Zeppelin days, especially when we were starting out.

The whole thing of doing what you want and not really thinking, 'Well, what should we do?'. It's that whole thing of just making music for yourself and hoping that if you like it, and it excites you, then it does the same for other people."

TCV formed earlier this year on the quiet. However, Jones first heard about Grohl's supergroup plan in late 2008 when the Foos frontman presented Led Zeppelin with the Outstanding Achievement award at GQ magazine's annual Men of the Year awards.

"He said he was going to do some stuff with his mate Josh and asked if I fancied coming along and joining in. I didn't give him an answer immediately but it sounded like good fun," says Jones.

At the time he was still unsure whether the Led Zeppelin reunion was going to continue and when singer Robert Plant decided against it, Jones was a free agent.

Jones had never met Homme - although he knew of Queens of the Stone Age - and they were introduced for the first time in January at Grohl's 40th birthday party which he held at the Medieval Times restaurant, where jousting knights ride round on horseback while you tuck into your spare ribs. "Dave said it was more like a place you have your 14th birthday than your 40th," remembers Jones.

He jokingly refers to the meeting as Grohl setting him and Homme up on a blind date. They arranged to get together to play a few days later at Homme's Baby Duck studios to see if the collaboration would work. "It was pretty apparent right from the word go it was going to be good," says Jones.