On a blustery Dublin evening in November 2018, five bookish 20-somethings slouched on to the stage at the low-ceilinged and sweltering Tivoli Theatre, strapped on their guitars and plunged into a ferocious post-punk assault.
The gig was barely under way when one of the guitarists knocked the mic stand over – but rather than attempt to right it, the mishap appeared to spur him on. To his left, the singer paced like a man who’d just come from a row with his girlfriend and had something he needed to get off his chest. He was agitation in human form.
Fontaines DC were merely the support act. But not a minute into their set, they’d already blown headliners, Shame, off the stage. To those of us crammed into the venue, it was obvious we were witnessing something extraordinary.
The opening song was “Chequeless Reckless”, an early standout in the set list of the quintet who had formed on the Dublin campus of the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMM) – located just down the road from the Tivoli and on the fringes of Dublin’s working-class Liberties neighbourhood. Eight years later, the Tivoli has been demolished to make way for an aparthotel. Fontaines DC, meanwhile, have just released their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, and are on their way to becoming one of the world’s biggest bands.
It’s quite a distance from the shabby charms of the Tivoli to the vast spaces Fontaines will headline next year – including Heaton Park in Manchester and London Stadium, alongside two nights at 80,000-capacity Slane Castle in Co Meath, which U2 will also grace in 2027. But even in 2018 it was clear to those in the Fontaines circle that big things lay ahead.
“It was striking, where you go, ‘oh, okay… there is something absolutely going on there,’” recalls Alan Cullivan, dean of BIMM Dublin. “You knew even by speaking to them. They’d make their plans: ‘We’re going to do this’.”
That ambition to be as big as possible was matched by their fierce desire to forge ahead musically. Dublin at the time was full of decent post-punk groups. Fontaines were determined to be better. “They wanted to write a song and then they wanted to write a better song,” says Cullivan. “Even in the early days when we used to go see them in town, they’d play a set. And the next time you’d see them there would be three new songs in the set.”
Fontaines DC had come together in BIMM, where they bonded over their love of Yeats, the writings of Joyce and post-punk iconoclasts such as The Fall. Students were encouraged to collaborate and it was out of this mixing and matching that Fontaines emerged – taking their name from Johnny Fontane, the sleazy Frank Sinatra stand-in in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, and affixing DC for “Dublin City” so as not to be confused with an American outfit called The Fontaines.
“When they started the four-year degree course here, it was really encouraged to jump and change and be in various different ensembles,” Cullivan says. “I’ve seen them all in various different bands. Slowly but surely, you can actually trace it. ‘Oh, now there’s two of them together, and now there’s three of them together. Oh, now there’s five of them.’ They used to rehearse here all the time – you could hear them rehearsing, they used to audition for college gigs, which they got very easily.”
Cullivan remembers attending their first show off the BIMM campus, in late 2014 at the Button Factory in Temple Bar – a 550-capacity venue which in 2001 had hosted the first Irish show by The Strokes (back when it went by the name of the Temple Bar Music Centre). He remembers the protean Fontaines as a mash-up of the punk fury of Iggy Pop and The Stooges and the rockabilly of Buddy Holly and The Crickets.
“You’d be struck at how good they were and how together they were,” he recalls. “They were very close to that sound they had with [debut single] ‘Liberty Belle’. It would have struck you there and then… this is very, very good.”
Fontaines DC aren’t the first rock band to come out of Dublin and conquer the world – the same happened 40 years previously with U2. The big difference is that U2 truly were a Dublin band – having met at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in the city’s Northside. But Fontaines were all outsiders – Dublin was new to them. That is perhaps why it served as a muse on early songs such as “Liberty Belle” – named after the pub they frequented in the working-class Dublin 8 neighbourhood where they lived – and “Boys in the Better Land”, a diaristic evocation of Dublin grit and romance.
They had come from near and far to attend BIMM. Singer Grian Chatten was from Skerries, a coastal commuter town 20 miles north of Dublin whose previous claim to musical fame was as the home town of Irish death metal band Primordial. Meanwhile, drummer Tom Coll and bassist Conor Deegan are from Castlebar in Co Mayo on the country’s West Coast, guitarist Conor Curley is from Emyvale in Co Monaghan, close to the border with Northern Ireland, and guitarist Carlos O’Connell grew up in Madrid.
“The band did birth itself in Dublin 8. The majority lived in a place down Francis Street direction – Meath Street, Thomas Street. That’s where they hung out for a good few years. They drank in the Liberty Belle,” says Cullivan. “They started in the most Dublin place you can get. They really lapped it up. The first line on the first album is, ‘Dublin in the rain is mine.’ I absolutely get that.”
Word spread quickly after those early gigs and by 2016 they were working with Trevor Dietz, a local promoter and DJ who would often man the decks with future Kneecap manager Daniel Lambert. He saw that Fontaines had the potential to be something other than a big band in the small pond that is the Dublin indie scene. But they were still under the radar when, in late 2017, Co Kerry publican and music fan Aiden O’Connor booked them for his pub Mike the Pies in Listowel as support for indie folk group The Hot Sprockets. He recalls hearing the band on the radio and then contacting their drummer on Facebook.
“One or two people mentioned them to me. Then I heard them on The Paul McLoone Show [an indie radio show presented by Feargal Sharkey’s replacement in The Undertones]. That night I messaged their Facebook page, even though I’d heard only one song, and invited them down. Tom the drummer came back to me: ‘We’d love to come. Here’s our manager’s email address’.”
The set drew 40 or so curious onlookers, O’Connor recalls. He was blown away by their songs – but even more so by their ambition and by the focus of their manager, Dietz , who died last June, aged 47.
“After the gig that night, I remember saying to Trevor, ‘We’ll do another support slot after Christmas. Build it up.’ And he was like ‘No, we’ll do a headline after Christmas.’ Trevor at that stage had a plan. It’s unbelievably sad that he won’t be at Slane Castle.”
Ireland is a country where people love to knock you down more than build you up, and as Fontaines DC began to gain attention in the UK and then the US, there was grumbling back home. One complaint was that the band’s image as stout-swilling street poets was contrived – a pitch to starry-eyed outsiders who think the streets of Dublin are paved with excerpts from Ulysses.
Without question, some of their early press was toe-curling – one American review said their music had “Guinness on its breath”; a piece in the New York Times described Chatten as walking around with a Flann O’Brien paperback. That said, their love of literature was sincere. When I met them in a bar in Dublin in early 2019, they were a riot of charity shop jackets and battered Adidas; one member of the band had a book of poetry sticking out of his pocket.
But they were always very clear that, rather than trying to build an image of punk poets, they were singing about the world they saw – the gritty streets of Dublin 8, their struggles as skint students. “We wrote the songs from a place of genuine experience and observation,” bassist Conor Deegan would tell me in 2020. “Because they were true to us, people saw themes in them. The struggles in our lives are the struggles in other people’s lives because we live normal lives. The rent problems. Our songs, inadvertently to a degree, came to resonate.”
Speaking to me a year earlier, Chatten was upfront about the grind to get by in the band’s early years, talking about how he had supported himself with an exhausting job manning the breakfast bar at a Dublin hotel. With an ear for drama typical of his lyric writing, he painted it not as a demanding entry-level position in the service industry but as a class struggle straight out of Les Misérables. “I was setting up a breakfast buffet every morning,” he said. “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.”
By 2020, Fontaines were going places and Chatten’s breakfast buffet period was a long way behind them. This was when Trevor Dietz had the idea of approaching Game of Thrones star Aidan Gillen to appear in the video for the title track from their second album, A Hero’s Death. Gillen was a fan of the Workman’s Club – a voguish indie spot several doors down from U2’s Clarence Hotel in Dublin where Dietz had DJ’d and which Fontaines played on numerous occasions in their early years. Gillen was only too happy to lend a hand.
He was struck by singer Chatten’s lyrics – how they combined the lyricism of Yeats, the surrealism of Joyce and the rambling anarchy of The Fall’s Mark E Smith, all performed in Chatten’s unaffected Skerries accent.
“Any lyrics that don’t rhyme too much are always a winner for me,” says Gillen, “and if they’re stream of consciousness that’s all the better. In my opinion Joyce is at his best when it’s either quite straightforward – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – or complete Finnegan’s Wake-style conundrumming. Any combination of the two, which Fontaines have at times, is going to be interesting.” The video they made together is a Lynchian fever dream, equal parts influenced by Twin Peaks and by old Irish chat shows.
A Hero’s Death came out at the height of Covid – a period in which many young bands struggled to sustain momentum. But in the case of Fontaines, the opposite happened. Something about their music spoke to people cloistered in their bubbles – and they got bigger and bigger. That remarkable story has become even more extraordinary in the ensuing years, and Dopamine Chamber looks set to be perhaps the biggest album of their career: in terms of commercial impact it could be their (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, their OK Computer.
It’s been a breathtaking rise – but to Alan Cullivan it certainly isn’t a surprise. From the very start, he had a sense Fontaines DC were going somewhere. He may not have guessed they would end up playing stadiums, but he knew they were destined for the big time, and quickly.
“I’ve got a 16-year-old son and an 18-year-old son,” says Cullivan. “They love them as much as I do. They’re hearing something new and exciting. I hear all the great bands that I was into – from Iggy and the Velvets to Bowie, the punk stuff in the middle, and then the New Wave stuff and the Pixies and Nirvana. All the way along – you can hear little bits of it. But they don’t sound like any of those bands,” he says.
“They obviously had plenty of influences but there was something about them,” agrees Mike the Pies’ Aiden O’Connor. “Even on the night you just knew. No one was expecting them to be headlining Slane Castle. But you knew there was something different about them.”
‘Dopamine Chamber’ is out now