Foo Fighters show us exactly how to kick off Live Lounge Month 2017

We thought it might be nice to ease you gently into Live Lounge month 2017 - but then realised that was a dreadful idea and kicked things off with Foo Fighters instead.

That's right, one of the biggest rock bands of all time performed a live session for Radio 1 to kick off a month of live music on with a killer performance of some of their biggest hits - and a few classics.

Here's what happened. We're still out of breath TBH.

But before the full Live Lounge, Nick Grimshaw had an early chat with Dave Grohl (or late for Dave, it was midnight in LA when we phoned him) about the session.

"We're here in our own studio right," Dave told Nick.

"This is somewhere we've made a lot of records and a lot of the songs you've heard on the radio so it's just like being at home."

But perhaps more importantly, Nick Grimshaw managed to introduce Dave to someone who made a big impression on the rock legend when they headlined Glastonbury festival this summer.

Foo Fighters returned to the music scene in 2017 with their single Run and new tune The Sky Is A Neighbourhood, but the band kept the songs - and even the fact they were recording a new album - under wraps.

"When we went into the studio we didn't tell anybody," he told Radio 1's Clara Amfo.

"We kept it a secret for six months or something like that. We were in the studio making the songs and we were so excited because I thought they were the best things we'd ever done.

"I was so nervous that one of the many people who were in the studio with us was going to tell someone that we were making a record. We have all these guests on the record too and we had to tell them not to tell anyone."

This is one of the first performances of that new song.

Best Of You is one of Foo Fighters biggest songs, but after recording it in 2005 (in the same room they performed for Radio 1), the band weren't so keen, so they forgot all about it.

"I remember we recorded it and we were like: 'That's the most annoying thing we've ever heard in our lives,'" said Dave.

"It sounded like a broken record so we put it away."

But they were tempted to dig it out again further along the recording process of their fifth album, In Your Honor.

"Later, our manager John was like: 'What about that song where you say best of you a thousand times,' we started playing it, thought it sounded alright so we put it on record.

"We still play it and people still sing along. It's fun."

Oh what could have been. The Foos had planned a cover of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up (played in the style of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit) but changed their mind.

Why? Something special happened on the road a week before their Live Lounge appearance.

"We were in Japan and we were backstage rehearsing a Rick Astley cover to do for this Live Lounge. We rehearsed it four or five times and it was hilarious," said Dave.

"Then we got on stage and we're playing and I look on the side of the stage and I see Rick Astley right there.

"We'd never met him before but I walked up to him and asked if he wanted to come out and do his song with us.

"He came out and did it and it was so much fun, I didn't think we could ever do that again."

But what they did instead was epic all the same.

The band didn't dress up as school-children (ask your dad) for their AC/DC cover, but the spirit of seventies rock and roll was alive and well in the Live Lounge when Foo Fighters performed their cover of Let There Be Rock.

Dave revealed how the song, from the band's 1977 album of the same name, inspired him to become a musican after he saw their iconic concert movie as a child.

"When I was a kid, about 10 or 11 years old, I went to this midnight movie and they would show these concert films in this movie theatre in Washington DC," he revealed.

"It's one of the most intense live performances I've ever seen by a rock and roll band.

"It changed my life and made me want to become a rock musician."

See the full line-up for Live Lounge Month 2017 here