Nandi Bushell | From drum battle to the Forum
Nandi Bushell challenged Dave Grohl to a drum battle, won the internet, and ended up playing Everlong on stage with the Foo Fighters. Her story and her kit.
In 2020, an English drummer posted a video challenging Dave Grohl to a drum battle.
Grohl accepted. What followed ran for months, involved a purpose-written song, ended with an on-stage appearance at the Forum in Los Angeles, and was — by a wide margin — the best thing that happened in drumming that year.
Nandi Bushell has been a professional musician ever since. Here is what she actually plays.
Who is Nandi Bushell?
Nandi Bushell is an English drummer and multi-instrumentalist, born in South Africa and raised in Ipswich, Suffolk.
She began posting drum covers online and built an audience the way modern drummers do: one immaculate, high-energy video at a time. The playing is what got the attention — the covers are accurate, hard-hitting and note-complete, not approximate.
Then, in 2020, she challenged Dave Grohl to a drum battle over “Everlong”.
The drum battle
It escalated in the best possible way. Grohl responded. She responded to his response. He wrote and recorded a theme song for her. She replied with her own song about him.
It ran across the whole of 2020, was covered by Rolling Stone and most of the world’s music press, and finished with Bushell playing “Everlong” on stage with the Foo Fighters at the Forum in Los Angeles.
Drumeo’s panel gave her the Tony Williams Award for Breakout Year in 2021.
What she has done since
- Recorded with Tom Morello on “The Children Will Rise Up”, alongside a formidable cast.
- Released her own original material, including the single “The Only One” in March 2025.
- Kept the covers going — a Slipknot cover played on a jazz-sized kit, Led Zeppelin, Rage Against the Machine — while writing songs of her own.
What Nandi Bushell actually does
She plays accurately. The covers are correct. That sounds like faint praise until you watch a hundred drum covers online and notice how few of them actually play the part.
She hits hard. Full strokes, real weight. It is why the videos sound like records rather than like bedroom clips.
She plays with obvious joy. This is not a small technical point. Her time gets better when she is enjoying herself, and it is enormously watchable — which is most of why the internet responded the way it did.
She is a multi-instrumentalist. Guitar, bass and vocals as well as drums, and she writes and produces her own material. The drumming is the entry point, not the whole story.
Nandi Bushell’s drum kit
Her setup has been assembled in the most charming way imaginable — a good deal of it given to her by other musicians.
- Drums — a custom Ludwig Legacy mahogany kit, a gift from Lenny Kravitz and jazz drummer Nate Smith. Legacy shells are a vintage-voiced mahogany-poplar design — warm, woody and much drier than a modern maple kit.
- Cymbals — Zildjian, who have sent her gear.
- Sticks — Vic Firth, likewise.
Every era, with buy links, is on Nandi Bushell’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
The thing worth copying here is not gear at all.
Learn the whole part. Pick one song you love and learn every fill, exactly as recorded, until you can play it without thinking. That is what she does, and it is the single most reliable way to get better at drums that anybody has ever found.
Then film it. Not for an audience — for you. A camera is the most honest teacher available, and it will show you what your playing actually looks and sounds like.
If you do want the gear side: a warm, vintage-voiced kit and one good pair of hi-hats will cover most of this. Our beginner drum kit guide and the Gear Guru will size it to a budget.
Where to start listening
- The Dave Grohl drum battle videos (2020). All of them, in order.
- “Everlong”, live at the Forum. The payoff.
- “The Children Will Rise Up” (2021). With Tom Morello.
- “The Only One” (2025). Her own writing.
Final thoughts
The internet produces a lot of drumming videos and very few drummers. Bushell is one of the very few, and the reason is simple: the playing was always the point, and the story was a by-product.
Whatever comes next — and she is early enough in her career that it could be almost anything — the drum battle already stands as one of the genuinely lovely things to have happened in music this decade.
See Nandi Bushell’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Dave Grohl — the other half of the story.