Foo Fighters and Alanis Morissette recently paide tribute to the late Sinead O’Connor on Saturday, joining forces for a cover of “Mandinka” during the Foos’ headlining performance at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival. Irish legend Sinead O’Connor recently passed away at the age of 56 after years of mental health battles.
“We’d like to make tonight very special for you because it’s nice to be back,” Dave Grohl told the audience beforehand. “So tonight, we’re gonna do something that we’ve never done before, with someone that we love very much. We want an old friend to come up and sing with us tonight for a very special reason. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome, to sing a song with us: miss Alanis Morissette.”
Morissette — whose shared history with Foo Fighters spans decades, as she toured with late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins in the ’90s — then dedicated the performance to “a beautiful woman of high intelligence and deep empathy, way ahead of her time, who is no longer with us. This is for her.”
“Mandinka” served as the second single off O’Connor’s 1987 debut album The Lion and the Cobra. The song peaked at No. 6 in her native Ireland and reached No. 17 in the United Kingdom.
It offered a glimpse of the massive success O’Connor would experience with her sophomore album, 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, which topped charts around the world along with its second single “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
