Viral video linked story of Athlone man and ex-Nirvana drummer who turned his life around after Kurt Cobain’s death Irish hitchhiker might have been reason behind creation of Foo Fighters A cousin of an Irish hitch-hiker who might have been the reason for the existence of US rock band the Foo Fighters said he hopes the band’s singer Dave Grohl can get in touch in the wake of a video that went viral. In an interview from 2021, Grohl, who was the drummer of grunge superstars Nirvana in the 1990s, spoke of a mysterious hitch-hiker whom he met while travelling in Ireland shortly after the death of Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's lead singer, who died by suicide at the age of 27 in April 1994. In a video posted by his cousin Eoin Tighe on X a few days ago, Lorcan Dunne from Athlone said he now realised that Grohl might have been talking about him.
“After Kurt died and the band was over, I did a bunch of soul-searching and I decided that I'm going to disappear. I'm going to go to the most remote place on Earth,” said Grohl during an interview with the New Yorker . “I went to the Ring of Kerry in Ireland, where I’ve been before, it’s so beautiful there.
“I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitch-hiker kid. I thought: ‘Well, maybe I'll pick him up’. And, as I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on.
“It was Kurt's face looking back at me, in the middle of nowhere. I realised like: “Oh, I can't outrun this. So I need to go home and f***ing get back to work'.
And so I did.” A video of Lorcan Dunne telling his side of the story has been recently shared on social media and went viral on X. Mr Dunne was on holiday with his family on the Beara Peninsula in 1994.
Lorcan Dunne “We hitched up to this place to go swimming. I was running ahead and I saw a car there, so I thought I'd run up and hitch,” Mr Dunne said in a video. “I looked into who was sitting in the passenger seat – but it was David Grohl.
I didn't recognise him at first, but I saw this look of shock on the guy's face. “I had a Nirvana t-shirt on with Kurt Cobain on it. It was black tie-dye, the one with Kurt where he has the mascara on his face.
“I saw the look of shock and the next thing, the car just tore off, away. And I turned around to Ciaran (his cousin) and I was like: ‘That was David Grohl, lad’. And nobody believed me.
” Mr Dunne said he only saw the interview with Dave Grohl talking about a “hitch-hiker kid” two weeks ago. “And I was like: ‘There you go, that was me’,” he added. Mr Dunne's cousin, Ciaran Tighe, was with Lorcan that day and said the family stayed in Allihies.
“Allihies technically isn't the Ring of Kerry, but it's the next peninsula down in West Cork,” he said . “We hitch-hiked a good bit when we were down there. We were in the middle of nowhere.
We said: ‘Lorcan, there's not a hope that was David Grohl’. “It's like if someone said to you: ‘I think I saw Bono’, and we said: ‘No, there's no chance that was Bono’, and you just sort of move on. So we moved on.
” The duo solved the mystery only recently during a family celebration in Bantry, Co Cork. Ciaran said: “We figured it out. Lorcan called me over and he said: ‘Do you remember down the Allihies?’ And I said: ‘Yeah’.
I honestly didn't know where the story was going. Then, he said: ‘And I'd worn my Nirvana t-shirt'. “And as soon as he said that, I knew exactly where it was going.
I said: ‘Oh my God, you're the hitch-hiker’.” Ciaran added there is still a “chance” that the American rock star will get in touch with Lorcan after he sees the viral video. “I know from Lorcan's point of view, that's what he would love,” said Ciaran.
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