Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age at Auckland's Spark Arena. Photo / Adam Jones
OPINION
US band Queens of the Stone Age took the stage at Auckland’s Spark Arena last night, February 29, as part of their ‘The End Is Nero’ Summer 2024 Australian and New Zealand tour. It is the band’s first appearance in Australasia since 2018. Frontman Josh Homme managed to create an intimate vibe for the 7000-stong audience, through dark self-depreciating humour and music dripped with innuendo and heartbreak.
There are bands that have been almost a permanent fixture of your life but for some unexplainable reason you’ve never seen them live.
You take their existence for granted because they are an enduring part of your playlist.
This oversight became stark while randomly watching an interview snippet last week of Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, and former drummer of the group in question, describing the best live rock band in the world — by far.
“When they hit the stage they’re the best rock band in the world. Like nobody even gets close,” Grohl said.
“There are amazing live bands that write powerful songs — Rage Against the Machine. There are amazing live bands that can make the audience go like this (hands gesticulating), The Prodigy, stuff like that. But for musicality and as a musician, you sit and watch Queens of the Stone Age and you’re like ‘that’s not fair, like what the f***’. Everybody in the band is a f***ing badass and they know it.”
And with the “coincidences” that often pop up via the sinister internet algorithms guiding all our online browsing, I then saw a few days later that Queens of the Stone Age were playing at Auckland’s Spark Arena.
So to right a wrong that had been simmering ever since I lay on my parents’ couch as a 14-year-old and listened to the new CD I’d bought, Songs for the Deaf, last night I went along to Spark Arena.
Filtering out of the surprisingly intimate stadium after an almost two-hour show, it would be hard to argue with Grohl’s assessment.
For a hard rock group, the sound was precise and full and rough and loose and moving all at once in a kind of contradictory beauty.
But it was also singer-songwriter, and only remaining founding member of the band, Josh Homme, who managed to make the 7000-strong crowd feel so united and intertwined.
It was sensual in a comically disconcerting way.
At the outset, Homme welcomed a woman with a sign saying “I’ve been waiting 10 years to hear I Appear Missing”.
Homme had the sign passed up to him and welcomed the woman and her guy up to dance at the side of the stage.
“We will play this later, I don’t know what her f****** name is but let’s say it’s Tania, we’ll do it for f****** Tania. Tania I’ve got you covered. But first a song about breaking up.”
There was actually a lot of dark self-depreciating humour throughout the night, dripped with innuendo and heartbreak.
For the first hour a string of melodic newer numbers off the more recent albums filled the set. Tracks such as Smooth Sailing, Paper Machette, My God is the Sun and Time & Place were tight and engrossing.
Between these, Homme was constantly conversing with the crowd, and focused directly on another eager woman.
“All you’re doing is dancing and smiling. I travelled 5000 miles to just do that. Babe let’s get f****** marrieeed. I love you too. But you know what happens to me in the end.”
Homme instantly transitioned into an acapella segment of the track Emotion Sickness off their new album In Times New Roman.
The refrain was sung with a painful tenderness: “Baby don’t care for me, baby don’t care for me, had to let her go, oh”.
For someone who loves the band largely for their first three albums: their self-titled 1998 album, 2000′s Rated R, and 2002′s Songs for the Deaf, I must admit the main section of the concert was largely devoid of older, harder tracks. This is with the exception of opening the concert with two of their biggest early alternative hits: No One Knows and The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret.
But admiring the tight groove of QOTSA’s musicianship, the crowd certainly didn’t seem to care what the band specifically played.
Guys were staring with rapt attention and girls were swaying and dancing and running their hands through their hair. Both reactions full of affirmation for what they were hearing. Although, the male bathroom did seem especially full during a more eccentric bop off the new album.
I Sat by the Ocean off their 2013 album Like Clockwork, was in keeping with the soulful theme of the set list while showcasing Homme’s adept pop hook songwriting skills.
It’s this quality of the band that sees them more popular than ever, 30 years after emerging out of the ashes of American stoner rock band Kyuss from Palm Desert, California, that disbanded in 1995.
There is still an edgy bleakness to the band that persists from these barren roots.
“Now we’re going to play something as depressing as f***,” Homme announced.
It was greeted with cheers galore from the crowd.
“Is that such a good thing?” Homme said fairly seriously in response.
They then launched into I Appear Missing — the song requested from the woman with the sign.
A beautiful rendition, bathed in purple light.
This was undeniably a masculine-infused event, and yet Homme with his crooning voice melds a feminine streak through hard rock so elegantly.
“This song is for my friend called Jack who always has a lot of homework to do,” Homme said before playing Burn the Witch.
We were speculating it might be Jack Black, who performed a cameo performance at the Foo Fighters a month earlier at Mt Smart. There was certainly a portly bloke at the side of the stage in a colourful tee and shorts stomping along with abandon. He didn’t stray into the light, however.
This morning, I was shocked to find out that this does not appear to have been wrong — a set list of the concert online announced Jack Black was backstage during the concert.
Nearing the end, Homme delved into some more intensive forms of audience participation during the song Make It Wit Chu.
He got the whole crowd to whistle in unison. Many just screamed.
He’d already just entered the crowd and walked through the general admin section playfully threatening people and simultaneously telling them how awesome they were, while the band continued to crank out Straight Jacket Fitting.
Minutes later he declared: ‘I always wished I could whistle like that, with two thighs either side of my face’
“Whisper it you c***s”, Homme now insisted.
“I want to make it, I want to make it with you.”
He then demanded: “Now shout it.”
The crowd did.
“It’s so f****** easy,” he said somewhat sadistically.
“I love you so f****** much,” he ended on. It was a strangely controlling erotic experience.
They then burst into Little Sister to end the main set. You felt satisfied.
The encore was exclusively from what I think is still, 22 years on, their best album, Songs for the Deaf. The chosen songs were: God Is in the Radio, Go With the Flow, A Song for the Dead.
Read together, these track titles make a kind of unforgiving Old Testament bible verse — updated with a modern absurdity.
There is a dark, joyful quality to the imagery like the night itself. The only thing that strayed into orderly perfection was the music itself.
Queens of the Stone Age will play TSB Arena, Wellington tonight, March 1, and Christchurch Arena, March 3.
Tom Dillane is an Auckland-based journalist covering local government and crime as well as sports investigations. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is deputy head of news.
The 61-year-old rocker and style icon will perform in New Zealand for the first time.