A song for the dead – Josh Homme on performing for six million souls in the bowels of the Paris Catacombs

Deep beneath the city streets, 20m below ground level and stretching across a sprawling 1,500km network, the Paris Catacombs are home to the remains of more than six million citizens. Consecrated as the Paris Municipal Ossuary (a container for the dead) in 1786, it is the largest example of its kind in the world: a monolith to mortality lying still under the bustling hub of the French capital.

It’s a space that has long captured the imagination of Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, since he first attempted to visit 18 years ago. The band have spent much of their 30-year career exploring the precarious seesaw between life and death, and this week, the storied Californian desert rock outfit will release Alive In The Catacombs: a performance film recorded last summer alongside director Thomas Rames and La Blogoteque that represents the first time any artist has been granted permission to play in the bowels of the landmark.

Far from transposing their heavy live show underground, the performance is contemplative and meditative, reworking five songs from across their back catalogue into new acoustic forms, with strings, glockenspiels and more. The endeavour, Homme explains, calling in from his Malibu home, was an exercise in letting your surroundings dictate the action. 'We never had any intention of playing loud in there, that just seemed disrespectful somehow. You can’t plug anything in and we really didn’t want to. It was more like, "What shall we play for these people who are much older?"’ he chuckles. 'It was about trying to be romantic with the people who were in there.'

‘Very early on, the band made it clear that the catacombs should be the true star of the film,’ Rames explains. 'They wanted to appear only as ghostlike echoes, blending into the scenery. That concept led me to collaborate with cinematographer Théo Fauger, whose work I greatly admire. He developed an incredible tool called the STEMIRAX, which allows real-time superimposition effects. Since this was a live performance at its core, it was the perfect tool to create a spectral, layered look without disrupting the band’s energy.'

Years in the planning, the project gained an added layer of symbolism and reactiveness when, midway through a stint of European shows and in the run-up to the proposed filming, Homme began to develop serious health issues related, he tells us, to his previous cancer battle and subsequent surgery back in 2022. The night before the shoot, the band were forced to cancel a proposed festival date in Venice in order for Homme to attend a nearby hospital for emergency tests. Faced with the doctor’s instructions to remain on the ward, he discharged himself and went ahead with a 102.8 fever that 'only kept on creeping'.

‘The day after the catacombs, I was on an emergency flight and, from landing, I was under the knife three hours later,’ he recalls. ‘[On the day] I was lying down in a cot between takes, but I just couldn’t let it go. I knew that if we didn’t play it then, it was gonna evaporate like trying to catch smoke in your hands. But that made it better too, because then there’s something of "Don’t just play here, stay here…" I need that romantic risk. I need that shit to feel good sometimes.'

Queens of the Stone Age - Alive in the Catacombs (Official Trailer) - YouTube

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Many of the film’s most striking moments arrive as a result of this uniquely extreme confluence of scenarios. The opening moments see Homme lying still on an altar before standing to begin opening track ‘Running Joke’; a shot that came to pass out of necessity. ‘I just needed a place to lie down for a second. I’m in the foetal position on this altar and Thomas is like… “Wait! Can you just stay there?”’ the frontman remembers. At another point, he’s heard muttering 'When you’re going through hell, keep going' – a pep talk to himself that was caught on the wireless mic and kept in the final edit. 'Everywhere you look, it’s you. You’re next,' Homme recalls of his surroundings. 'It was intense and you feel the intensity.'

Negotiating these considerable challenges, there’s an electricity to the recording that, explains Rames, came from prepping enough to allow the 'happy accidents' to occur. 'The goal is to make the technical aspect disappear in favour of spontaneity and the live experience, while still delivering a polished, cinematic result,' he says. Inspired by German expressionism, he employed 'static shots and very slow zooms' to immerse the viewer in the room. 'The 4:3 aspect ratio was a deliberate choice: it works beautifully with the vanishing lines of the catacombs' endless corridors, and it allowed us to isolate the band members within the frame, almost like figures in a painting.'

Homme and the band, meanwhile, fully embraced the new possibilities afforded to them by the visceral location. 'That space makes you do things,' he says. 'With Thomas, we were like, “Right, when you say ‘action’ we’re not gonna do anything for 20 seconds so don’t trip out. We’re gonna stare at each other and let the ceiling drip, and let the vents just sort of moan, and when we’re done with the tape let’s just not do anything for 20 or 30 seconds. We’ll play for these people and then we’ll turn the room back over to them.”’ Necessarily inventive with the staging, the wider shots of ‘Villains of Circumstance’ fully plunge the watcher into the tightness and claustrophobia of the environment, while, conversely, ‘I Never Came’ finds Homme walking through a corridor of string players – a strange juxtaposition of precision and grit.

'What I am proud of is you’re hearing Take One of two, or Take Two of three. There’s no fixing, there’s no correcting. In the first song, there’s a moment where I [groan] instead of singing – it’s this guttural thing, and what am I supposed to do, take it away? Frankly it’s my favourite part,' he suggests, 'because this is the lifelong search to just feel real for one moment, and it’s not easy but I don’t care about that. I just want to feel normal for one fucking minute, and in that environment it’s funny how you can feel like you’re exactly where you should be.'

The project has made the band consider what else could be possible for their live show. 'We’ve been talking about reimagining reams of our songs and maybe going and doing a tour this way. I just love going where I’m not supposed to. We’re in Wallpaper*, right?’ Homme laughs. 'So this catacombs thing is making me think we should go to venues where we wouldn’t normally be, where everyone’s all dressed up. Infiltration in the best way possible: infiltration and corruption as if it were a good thing.'

Alive In The Catacombs also lays the breadcrumb trail for what might come next for the band, as Homme exits while singing a line from what appears to be a new song with the lyrics 'insignificant other'. 'You might be right…' he teases when the idea is suggested. Back in 'great' health, the band have been writing extensively and with a new lease of life following their brush with the Parisian dead. 'We’re very busy right now, and [the catacombs] has impacted everything in the way we really hoped it would,' Homme says. 'You’re always looking for something to charge your batteries and send you in a new direction. This has sent us off on a search and that search is the most exciting part.'

Alive In The Catacombs is available at qotsa.com from 5 June 2025