Fontaines DC interview: Why don’t you hear Irish accents on the radio?

Grian Chatten – lead singer of the all-conquering Dublin rock band – talks fame, ambition and identity

“I still feel there’s a lot of ground to be explored with guitars,” says Grian Chatten, frontman for thrilling Irish rock band Fontaines DC. “The sound of humans scratching a chord out has always been more exciting to me than anything that essentially had to go through Steve Jobs to sound good,” he adds, referring to the ubiquity of Apple software GarageBand in pop music these days. “I don’t like hearing a brand of laptop when I listen to music.”

Since forming in Dublin in 2017, bonding over a love of poetry and punk, Fontaines DC have crashed their way to the top of the pile. While critics lamented the death of rock, they were building a loyal audience on the back of relentless touring marked by rabble-rousing performances. Their 2019 debut, Dogrel, went top 10 in the UK – arty enough to be nominated for the Mercury Prize, accessible enough to be playlisted on Radio 1. Their epic follow-up, A Hero’s Death, was kept off the top spot only by Taylor Swift, and earned them Brit and Grammy award nominations.

Their third album, Skinty Fia, is released today, another work of immense power and purpose, adding dimensions of brooding melodiousness to their electrical storm of furious guitars and juddering rhythms. At the forefront are Chatten’s intense, existentialist lyrics, delivered in a thick Dublin accent.

“The music came first, really,” says Chatten, who has been unabashed about his poetic aspirations. “I was writing songs [at] nine years old, but poetry seemed to belong to brainier people. I felt with the added context of music, I could sharpen words to mean more than they would when exposed on a page.”

He loved WB Yeats. “The neatness of his writing resonated with me, his attention to structure and form, as well as always being inclined to write something epic and everlasting.” This led him and his bandmates to other Irish writers, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as an obsession with James Joyce’s short story A Painful Case from his 1914 collection Dubliners, a tale of an aesthetic life lived badly, resulting in dreadful loneliness. After meeting at music college, the five friends self-published two collections of poetry before even forming a band, taking their name from Johnny Fontaine, the crooner in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (with DC added to represent Dublin City). “I was really looking at Ireland through the eyes of literature and music. I loved the streets and the romance of them.”

Grian Chatten performs at Alcatraz in MilanCredit: Shutterstock

Handsome and scruffy, with heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes, Chatten has a soft-spoken intensity, shambling about his flat in Kentish Town, north London, boiling a kettle on a gas hob beneath a framed concert poster for Nick Cave and a vintage NME cover featuring Shane MacGowan of the Pogues. Books scattered about include Crime and Punishment and For Whom the Bell Tolls. “The most interesting, exciting and rewarding thing for me is writing,” he says. “It can make me ecstatic, I literally physically jump around the room, it just consumes me. That’s happiness to me.”

Fontaines DC found themselves part of a thriving live scene embracing spoken word and mosh pits, led by Bristol band Idles and shared by bands including Shame, Sports Team, The Murder Capital and most recently Dry Cleaning, Yard Act and (to a lesser extent) Wet Leg. “Part of it is really that I didn’t want people to miss what I was saying,” he explains. “A melody, if it’s too good, it can bend your ear, it can be too distracting.”

You might trace this “recitational” form back to pioneering punk wordsmiths Mark E Smith of The Fall and Ian Dury with The Blockheads, a style revived in the noughties by electro punk duo Sleaford Mods. Perhaps the influence of rap music also held sway with this youthful generation, although Chatten pushes the roots back further. “With The Velvet Underground, there’s a sort of rebellion against melody, and I found that brought me closer to Lou Reed, to his voice. I was always interested in people who, instead of being songbirds, were kind of inhabiting and embodying the lyric.”

Yet as Fontaines DC have progressed, Chatten has started singing more. “I’m a little bit older, and I’d like to move on. The only thing is, I’m not a brilliant singer, like, so let’s see how we get on.”

Performing in his Dublin accent was a conscious decision. “When we come from a country that is so artistically influential, why is the Irish accent on the radio such an anomaly? It’s another way to stick the flag in the ground and be like ‘I’m f—— here!’”

Fontaines DC at the Brit Awards, 2021Credit: Getty

The album title Skinty Fia came from an expression used as a substitute for swearing by an elderly Gaelic-speaking aunt of drummer Tom Coll. “She’d say ‘Ah, skinty fia!’ if she dropped something.” But the phrase, which Chatten says roughly translates as “the damnation of the deer” (although a more accurate translation is “startled deer”), spoke to Chatten’s ideas of Irishness abroad – “people singing trad tunes in an Irish pub in Dalston, Boston dying its rivers green on Paddy’s Day. That fascinated me as an Irishman living in London.”

He settled in the city during the pandemic because “I fell in love with a London girl”. But he was also intrigued by gaining a distanced perspective on Irish culture, and his own sense of alienation and isolation, all of which fed into the new album.

The pandemic was hard for his band. “There was a genuine fear, like, if we can’t tour, do we have to go back to our old jobs?” Yet he also enjoyed the domestic stability lockdown forced upon him. “To wake up in the same bed, on the same road, which I walk down to buy milk off the same person, I felt like I was putting down roots. Touring alienates me from people who live in one place. There’s a whole idea that you get to see the world. You don’t, really, you get to see your bus, you get to see backstage. And then you do a soundcheck and try to think of something else to do that isn’t going to the pub before the gig.

“It doesn’t sound like much to complain about, but when this is your life for 12 months, and maybe for the next 10 years, maybe forever, that’s a haunting prospect. I have literally laid in my bunk on the bus, on the way from some city to another, with tears in my eyes, just wanting to go home.”

And yet Fontaines DC exhibit a tangible sense of ambition. “It’s not about fame, it’s not about money, it’s about the writing, that’s the God’s honest truth. I just want to be able to keep disappearing into that world, and if this is the cost, then so be it. I have absolutely no interest in celebrity, but if I had to sit on the couch next to Timothée Chalamet or whoever and talk about the funniest thing that ever happened to me with a piece of cutlery in order to do what I love, then I’ll do that.”

‘Skinty Fia’ by Fontaines DC is released by Partisan Records today