Dave Grohl unveils 23-minute song called Play to inspire people to learn instruments and make their own music

Can you make it all the way to the end?

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has released a 23 minute song in the hope of inspiring people to pick up instruments and make their own music.

The track, called PLAY, is officially released on August 11 but can be heard in a new mini documentary out now on BBC iPlayer.

PLAY, which is directed by Grohl, is about "celebrating the rewards and challenges of dedicating ones life to playing and mastering a musical instrument."

Part one opens with behind the scenes footage featuring discussion on his love of playing music before the 23-minute, one-man-band instrumental recording on which he plays all seven instruments on the track, all live.

PLAY ranks among one of the longest songs ever recorded, alongside tracks such as The Orb's The Blue Room (39m58s), Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond (26m01s) and Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Karn Evil 9 (29m36s).

However, these all pale in comparison to The Flaming Lips, who in 2014 recorded a song for 24 hours. The track, called 7 Skies H3, was released on a flash drive for Record Store Day. while a 50-minute edit was released as an album.

Rob Parkinson

10th August 2018

Pure respect to Dave, hope it does inspire people especially the younger generation to learn to play an actual musical instrument rather than just use samples from the internet to create music. There is nothing better than watching a live act on tour such as imagine dragons, the script, paloma faith(amazing band she has), ed Sheeran (plays all his own instruments although these days he records them prior to show and informs the audience of this, the first time I saw him live in las Vegas as a support act for snow patrol, he recorded and played all the instruments in front of the crowd then played them back playing his guitar and singing over the recordings, cant get much more musical than that), there are so many great musicians out there be inspired.