- Music
- 20 Oct 17
Hot Press meets one of Dublin's finest emerging acts, Fontaines
Fontaines chat punk, poetry, and embracing their own voice.
Had they not received an offer from Dublin promoter Trev Dietz to play a gig at Workman’s a year and a half ago, Fontaines might never have ended up sitting down for a chat with your Hot Press interviewer. After months of going nowhere, it took one gig to set them back on the path that would lead to them being one of the most exciting, and authentic, Irish bands to emerge on the scene in a long time.
“I was going out of my mind,” says frontman Grain Chatten. “We hadn’t done a thing as a band for a long time. There was some asbestos in the house I was living in and I kept telling everyone I was losing my voice and that’s why I couldn’t play. In reality, I was going out every night and getting drunk. I just wasn’t in the right headspace.
“We hadn’t gigged for about six months. Then we got offered a gig from Trev and I initially declined, because I was going nuts in my own company and didn’t want to see anyone. I thought I was gonna come out of this solitary confinement one day with the next Abbey Road. Then Tom, our drummer, turned round and said seriously to me, ‘Man if we don’t take this gig, it’s gonna be six months since we last played live.” So we decided to play it. We practiced really hard for weeks and wrote a load of material. Then by the time it came round we realised we had a set of fantastic songs. We went out and played a great set and from there, it just blew up in our minds.”
Having met at BIMM Music College in Dublin, the five members of the band were drawn to each other by a mutual feeling that they needed to go beyond their course curriculum to get to the bottom of their songwriting aspirations.
“We were being taught things that were gearing us towards using all these different chords and different progressions,” says Conor Deegan. “We appreciated that, but we were like, ‘Let’s write a load of songs with three chords and see how it goes’.”
The straightforwardness of the three-chord method gave the lads room to mine their lyrical aspirations.
“Our songs are all wordy, because we’re all constantly writing poetry,” says Grain. “And we didn’t want to compromise that poetry for the melody, so it was just conducive to have a punk rhythm section.”
Naturally, their inspirations include everyone from John Cummins and Luke Kelly via Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. Yeats is in there too – and the lads cite him as a unifying figure. But rather than adopt the poet’s sometimes haughty tone and voice, their own sound comes straight from the heart, right down to Grain’s embracing of the North Dublin accent when singing.
“I think the way you sing is just mad important,” he says. “Because I used to sing in this incredibly affected accent that oscillated between being American and English. And I think since I’ve grown out of that, I’ve always been touched and proud of the North Dublin accent. You don’t hear enough of it on the TV. Everyone on TV talks in a really fucking Oxbridge version of the Dublin accent. It’s hard to relate to that. I guess that’s part of the frustration that feeds into why we’re doing the band in the first place. It just makes everything more real when you say things in your own way. If you were to write a love poem and you say it in your own accent, there’s an incredible coat of sincerity there. If you’d have done the RTE version – a really watered down version – it would just sounds like it came from any person. People need to embrace their own accents and their own thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, if you worry about trying to say something in a way that you think will be relatable – it won’t be.”
Fontaines are incredibly sincere, both in person and in their music. The band’s talents have seen them support the likes of Hinds, YAK and Girl Band over the last 12 months. They also earned themselves a spot at this year’s Hard Working Class Heroes and have laid out an extensive Irish tour. They seem to be inexorably heading towards a label deal in the future. Is anything on the table?
Grain and Conor share a cautious glance at each other.
“Eh, I think I’ll tell the news to my parents first before I tell Hot Press if that’s alright,” says Grain.
Something big is afoot... Keep an eye on these lads.
