Fontaines DC: Dublin city rockers
Fontaines D.C’s debut album arrives as a hard-edged antidote to other elements of the Irish music scene, writes
Soccer AM viewers got more than they bargained for recently when Dublin punk band Fontaines D.C. graced the Sky Sports banter-fest. In the almost oppressively bright and antiseptic studio, the five piece cut a gritty presence. And that was before frontman Grian Chatten opened his mouth and began declaiming in a ripe Dublin accent.
“We’re so far away from that football world. And Soccer AM is it’s own entity,” recalls guitarist Conor Curley. “You think, ‘I have no idea why I am here’. You’re trying to gauge if people really like it or if you’re just cattle, stampeding through. I wonder if we’ll ever do it again.”
Lighting up Sky Sports at stupid o’clock in the morning is just one of many surreal events that have befallen Fontaines D.C. in the past six months. The British music press — what remains of it at any rate — has proclaimed the band the future of rock’ n roll.
Hipster motherlode Vice magazine meanwhile dispatched a reporter to Dublin to lavish praise on Fontaines and take the temperature of the local scene. “Dublin’s bands are too good to ignore,” went the headline, glossing over the fact that one of the outfits singled out was from Dundalk.
The hype is therefore strong as Fontaines D.C. count down to their debut album, Dogrel. Yet in the corner of a city centre hotel Chatten and Curley are unimpressed, perhaps slightly discombobulated, by the fuss.
This is exactly as you would hope. As anyone who has seen Fontaines D.C. in concert will attest, part of the appeal is that they aren’t glossy or cocksure . All in their early 20s they are too young, and perhaps too jaundiced, to qualify as Millennials and exude that hostility to confirming that is increasingly a signature of Gen Z music. They don’t carry themselves like people who want to “make it” in the industry as much as they want to say and do something meaningful with their lives.
Fontaines D.C. are the same in person — more interested in discussing poetry (which is how many of Chatten’s lyrics begin) or the Hermann Hesse novel Curley is wading through. Yet if they don’t appear to have especially strong feelings regarding their career — they’re happy that they’re closing in on selling out two nights at Vicar Street but not exactly high-fiving one another — there’s plenty about which they are engaged.
One subject close to their hearts is the growth pains Dublin is undergoing as it attempts to sloughs off its provincial skin and reckon with being at least a quasi-international conurbation. With wealth and status comes gentrification, of course — something the capital is struggling to deal with (along with the stone-age public transport and an incomprehensible aversion to a 21st century skyline).
All of this is close to Chatten’s heart. Before the band went full time last summer, he worked in a hotel while not having a home of his own. He would serve the great and good by day, then crash with friends at night. In the process, he received an insight into the two cities living cheek by jowl, not quite at ease with one another. That twitchiness seeps into the lyrics of Dogrel.
“Dublin in the rain is mine/ a pregnant city with a catholic mind,” he sings on the single ‘Big’ — one of a number of tracks in which the narrator scrutinises his love / hate relationship with the capital.
“I was setting up a breakfast buffet every morning,” he says.
Up at 4.30am to set up breakfast for the rich of Dublin while working a minimum wage job. And I’d have to smile through it. It was at that time I had no gaff. The rich were getting richer and I was sleeping on people’s couches.
He’d always loved music and poetry. But it never occurred that he could be a musician. After school the plan was to study computer science. But a family friend told him he was making a huge mistake. So instead he attended the BIMM Dublin music course. “My granny’s friend, Betty, came up and said ‘No, that’s not you,” he recalls. “She gave me my first record — a Buddy Holly original pressing from the Fifties.”
The band’s shared love for vintage rock partly inspired their retro name “Fontaines” — though it also flowed from their fondness of the Johnny Fontaine character from The Godfather. They added D.C. — “Dublin City” — to distinguish them from another band in America and because they liked how it looked written down.
Another thing they were clear about from the start was that Chatten would sing in his own Dublin accent (though technically he’s an outsider, coming from the north county Dublin town of Skerries).
“When I started feeling that I was really expressing myself, it became an insane prospect to sing in a different voice. That’s comparable to giving your words to someone else. Singing in someone else’s accent is a force against yourself, against your self-expression. We all in the band because we believe in being authentic If the rest of the band are being authentic, then I have to be too.”
One thing that drove them early on was their belief that the Dublin music scene was flagging. There were lots of singer-songwriters. But they felt there was a lack of groups with an “us against the world” outlook.
“There was such a lack of bands,” says Curley, who like all the other musicians in the line up is from outside Dublin (in his case rural Monaghan). “We thought that was an idea we would explore, rather than everyone wanting to be producer-songwriter type.
Dogrel could be interpreted as a quiet rant against the gentrification that has made Dublin unaffordable to many young people (and plenty of older ones too). So it was ironic that one of their recent shows in the capital, playing with Shame in November, was in the Tivoli Theatre, which has since shuttered and is to be demolished to make way for a hotel.
“Venues being knocked downed stuff like that is nurturing to art,” is Chatten’s counterintuitive take. “Limitations are nurturing. When venues get shut down — that’s often when art flourishes. Limitations can be helpful.”
