Billie Eilish salutes late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins with Grammys performance
The Foo Fighters opted to skip the Grammy Awards on Sunday, so weren't able to pay tribute to their recently deceased drummer Taylor Hawkins. But Billie Eilish offered up one in their place, incorporating a salute to Hawkins into her live performance.
Hawkins died on March 25 in Bogotá, Colombia — where the band was scheduled to perform at the Estéreo Picnic music festival. The Foo Fighters subsequently canceled all their upcoming live performances and decided not to attend the Grammys, where they won all three awards for which they were nominated for their recent album Medicine at Midnight.
Hawkins played on Medicine at Midnight, contributed to EW's recent oral history of the Foo Fighters, and also appeared in the band's horror film Studio 666.
When it came time for Eilish to perform "Happier Than Ever," the title track of her latest Grammy-nominated album, she donned a T-shirt emblazoned with Hawkins' image. As she was taking her bow at the end of the performance, she lifted up the shirt to make sure no one missed it.
Later, just before the show's In Memoriam segment, host Trevor Noah noted that this was when he would have introduced the Foo Fighters. The band was supposed to perform — and we would have been celebrating their three Grammy wins. Instead, the Grammys began the In Memoriam tributes to the musicians and music industry figures lost over the past year with a dedication to Hawkins. Video clips of Hawkins playing onstage with the Foo Fighters were set to the band's song "My Hero." The lyric "there goes my hero" became especially powerful in this tragic context.
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