Fontaines DC darkens on a third inhabited album which questions its Irishness. Maintenance.
The sky is blue. The sun is shining. Grian Chatten is outside, in Düdingen, Switzerland, where Fontaines DC is performing that evening, a few weeks before the release of his third album. Sometimes a plane, sometimes a hen comes for a walk in the quite bucolic decor. After singing the ransom of glory on A Hero’s Death, the five trendy boys question Skinty Fia regarding their Irishness. Those who now live in London. “I moved almost two years ago. It didn’t change me, but it gave me new perspectives. For years, I didn’t really live anywhere. We were on the road all the time. time and the few days when we returned to Dublin, I slept on sofas. I had never had a place of my own since I had left the family cocoon. I needed a place where I might stay during the pandemic and I had met a girl.”
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The sky is blue. The sun is shining. Grian Chatten is outside, in Düdingen, Switzerland, where Fontaines DC is performing that evening, a few weeks before the release of his third album. Sometimes a plane, sometimes a hen comes for a walk in the quite bucolic decor. After singing the ransom of glory on A Hero’s Death, the five trendy boys question Skinty Fia regarding their Irishness. Those who now live in London. “I moved almost two years ago. It didn’t change me, but it gave me new perspectives. For years, I didn’t really live anywhere. We were on the road all the time. time and the few days when we returned to Dublin, I slept on sofas. I had never had a place of my own since I had left the family cocoon. I needed a place where I might stay during the pandemic and I had met a girl.” Out of sight but always close to the heart… Chatten has reflected a lot from the English capital on the relationship he has with his country, its people, its culture. “The first songs I wrote for this record already talked regarding my relationship to my Irish roots and I was not yet living in London. As soon as we start releasing the singles for a new album, we feel uncomfortable. We let them go and we immediately write new songs to replace them, to make sure that we are always a little ahead of the public. us he doesn’t know.” The album’s opening track, In ár gCroíthe go deo (“In Our Hearts Forever”), echoes the true story of an Irish family in Coventry, near from Birmingham. On the grave of the deceased, Margaret Keane, her relatives wanted to engrave this message, but the authorities initially refused, fearing that it would scare people and pass for a political message. “It was two years ago; during the pandemic. It shocked us. We were moving to London and it prepared us mentally. I thought of all these microaggressions that end up hurting. the perception that the United Kingdom can keep of Ireland…” For Chatten, Irishness, Irishness, is this ability to quickly access a certain sentimental depth. With humor, without taking themselves seriously. To stay in touch, he listens to the radio. Including a jazz show, Mystery Train, presented by John Kelly on RTÉ Lyric FM. “I like to hear these voices, these accents, this way we have of speaking. Simpler, less pretentious than on the often very conservative and pompous English stations.” Grian speaks a little Irish. He learned it around the age of 13 during a summer camp from which you get kicked out when you talk English. “I don’t know if we would be more popular in the UK if we had a British accent. But I think it’s important for the UK to hear our accent on the radio. Bonos and Hoziers don’t sound not really Irish to me and I’m OK with that. It’s also regarding the fact that the UK and the US have a monopoly on the entertainment industry. That made it all the more important to us.” We sometimes think of Oasis and the Gallagher brothers when listening to Skinty Fia. Musically, the disc was notably inspired by the Contino Sessions of Death in Vegas and XTRMNTR of Primal Scream… “Beyond the accent, the words, the lyrics, I think there is Irishness in our music. In different ways depending on the songs. I feel like on the premiere of the album, it’s me trying to sound like Sinéad O’Connor. A kind of sean-nós, a style traditional Irish singing. I also play the accordion on this record.” His mother gave him a second-hand one for Christmas, which he uses on the stripped-down and heartbreaking The Couple Across the Way. “I wrote the song the same day. I had never practiced before. I don’t really play it. I found a very easy way to use the instrument.” Skinty Fia means “the damnation of the deer”. “That’s the kind of expression you use when you’ve dropped something. Carlos came up with the idea of the deer in a house for the cover. It’s a striking image of something that isn’t in its place. It sticks to the record, which explores cultural identity and what changes it.” Launched on what excites him most artistically in the land of the three-leaf clover, Chatten talks regarding Girl Band and Just Mustard, which he embarked on tour to ensure his first part. Commitments and Waking Ned Devine. “This is the story of a village that mobilizes to fool the national lottery and pocket the jackpot despite the death of the winner, struck down by a heart attack.” He quotes the poet Patrick Kavanagh and his Inniskeen Road: July Evening, evokes Colin Farrell and Barry Keoghan (the film Killing the Sacred Deer). A true Dubliner, Chatten played national sports, hurling and Gaelic football until he was 15. “I was pretty good. But I was taking drum lessons too. At one point I had to choose and I preferred music to sports.” Of the Irish spirit, he has the characteristic extremism. “I always struggle to sleep or rest only following I’ve finalized a song. It obsesses me so much. I hear the whole song from beginning to end with all possible instrumentation. I’m afraid of losing or missing a song. idea, mentally. I’ll have to be really careful when we start writing once more. Because that will mean that I’ll be sleep deprived, that I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. inside. I even have a hard time listening to people talking to me.” When he comes off stage, Grian sometimes feels like his brain is starving for oxygen. “I have to lie down a bit. It’s probably the intensity that I try to put into it. It seems so necessary to me, so linked to who we are, to our identity.”