Foo Fighters cancel tour dates after Dave Grohl breaks leg

It looks like Dave Grohl’s broken leg has thrown the proverbial “Monkey Wrench” into the band’s summer tour.

Awful puns notwithstanding, the Foo Fighters announced Tuesday that they will cancel five summer dates in England and Belgium after Grohl snapped his leg while belting out the late-’90s hit during a set last Friday in Sweden.

The band, which already canceled weekend dates in Switzerland, will also have to abandon a pair of shows at London’s Wembley Stadium, as well as dates in Edinburgh and Belgium and a June 26 performance at England’s Glastonbury Festival, the band said in a statement.

Grohl, who managed to finish Friday’s show with an assist from a paramedic, also published a blog post Tuesday detailing the lunacy of finishing a pulse-pounding Foo set when he probably should have been on an operating table.

“I asked if I could get back onstage to finish the show, but they said I needed a cast (which was 20 minutes away at the hospital) to hold my ankle in place,” Grohl wrote in a blog post (which you can read here if you’re not shy about profanity). “So I looked my EMT, Johan, in the eyes and said, ‘Well, then you’re coming up there with me right now and holding it in place until they can bring the cast here.’”

Although he powered through that set, Grohl said, his doctors have advised him to cancel shows to avoid infections or other long-term complications after surgery.

The Foo Fighters have been on tour since last year promoting “Sonic Highways,” their eighth studio album, which was also the focus of an HBO documentary. The band is still scheduled to hit Southern California this year, with back-to-back dates at the Honda Center in Anaheim in September.

Follow @JamesQueallyLAT on Twitter for breaking news.