Billie Eilish and Finneas pay tribute to Taylor Hawkins
"Taylor was such a legendary player"
By Joe Goggins
Billie Eilish has become the latest star to pay tribute to Taylor Hawkins, calling his passing “incredibly heartbreaking.”
The Foo Fighters drummer died last Friday (March 25) in a Bogota hotel room, hours before the band were due to play a huge show in the Colombian capital; they were in the thick of a South American tour. On the red carpet at the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday (March 27), shortly before she and her brother and collaborator Finneas won the Oscar for Best Original Song, Eilish told Scott Evans and Zuri Hall of Access Hollywood of the moment she heard the news.
“It was incredibly heartbreaking. It was right before we went on stage. And we got the news and it really, really tore us all apart. It’s horribly, horribly tragic.” Eilish was playing a headline show on Friday night at Pledge Arena in Seattle, Washington, the city where Foo Fighters was born, initially as a solo project for frontman Dave Grohl. Finneas, too, paid tribute to Hawkins, telling Evans and Hall: “Taylor was such a legendary player. We were admirers of his work years before we got to meet him.”
“And we only met him a handful of times,” Finneas went on. “I wish we got to spend more time with him, but he couldn’t have been a kinder, cooler, more generous person as well. And such a deeply inspiring person. We’re just heartbroken.” Eilish and her brother performed ‘No Time to Die’, the theme from the 2021 Bond film of the same name, at the ceremony at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theater.
They thanked the likes of Hans Zimmer and Johnny Marr in their victory speech, both of whom contributed to the studio recording; Zimmer won his own Oscar on Sunday, for Best Original Score for ‘Dune’; it was his second win, after ‘The Lion King’ in 1995.
Meanwhile, Foo Fighters are set to re-enter both the UK album and singles charts this week. As fans flock to their discography in the wake of Hawkins’ death, their 2009 ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation sat at number five in the mid-week charts, with ‘Everlong’ at 58 in the singles rundown.