Fontaines DC: between featurings and poetry, 6 artistic escapades of the group

Kneecap with Grian Chatten and Tom Coll in “Better Way To Live”

When three terrible children from Belfast meet the most astute pen in Dublin, the result is Better Way To Live, a song where hip-hop colors and funky bass come together. Kneecap, a trio consisting of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, met Grian Chatten and Tom Coll in their hometown, at Madden’s Bar. A very Irish pub where all these little people became friends and decided, some time later, to join forces for a featuring.

First single from a hot album just released via Heavenly, entitled Fine Art, Better Way To Live opens with the rap of Chatten, a decidedly jack-of-all-trades. Kneecap, for their part, switch from English to Irish Galeic, the dialect with which they punctuate their radical political discourse (and not always to the taste of the British government, which has decided to deprive them of the public fund intended for musicians). In the clip that accompanies the song – filmed at Madden’s Bar, in fact – a certain image of the daily life of the locals is depicted. With banter on our lips, we escape the fog outside, we drink pints of Guinness and we don green-white-orange flags. “If there’s a better way to live, I’ve gotta have it”, they think out loud.

Carlos O’Connell, on guitars for Film Noir

It all started with a meeting. One evening in 2020, while he was living in Paris, Carlos O’Connell went to one of Film Noir’s concerts. The French group led by Joséphine de La Baume, who created a nebulous rock with cinematic imagery reminiscent of La Femme or Juniore, captivated the musician. Visibly seduced by what he heard throughout the concert, O’Connell got closer to its members once the set was over. They all got to know each other. “He hung on well, we talked quite a bit”, remembers the singer of the group to the media JackThey agree on a small musical session for the next day: a cover of For A Day Like Today by Lee Hazlewood – eminent figure of US pop in the sixties.

Two years later, Film Noir recorded its first album, Thrilling, in London. The group then contacts Carlos O’Connell again, who comes to visit them “to try things out“. Eventually, the band members invited him to play twelve-string guitar on I Will Rise. And in the studio, or maybe it was before, he and Joséphine de La Baume end up falling in love. A kind of love at first sight.

“Chaos For The Fly”, Grian Chatten’s sublime solo escape

It was, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful albums of 2023. Chaos for the Flythe name of a solo escape: that of Grian Chatten. Nine tracks of rare sensitivity, attesting (if it was still necessary to be convinced) to the talent of composer as well as performer of the leader of Fontaines DC Pieces collected over the albums and the years, those which “stay on the shelf”, aside, because not necessarily relevant or “consistent with the overall project”, confided the artist in our columns last year.

“I hadn’t anticipated the idea of ​​making a solo record, I had an epiphany while walking along Stoney Beach; and the pieces, the arrangements, the choruses, what I wanted to tell, fell into place,” he then continued, adding that he knew “exactly how it was supposed to sound, with all these little details that [lui] “They hold it very dear.” And to conclude: “I didn’t want these songs to interfere with the next Fontaines DC, I didn’t want to impose my point of view on the group or, above all, reduce them to studio musicians, so I did it alone.” The feeling of touching with your finger, here, the quintessence of his writing.

Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten, in poetic symbiosis on “I Saw Light”

“Tapped out a few laughs on the summer’s grass / And in all the sky’s many merry blues / I read one thousand words / Of pretty good news”, declaims Grian Chatten in I Saw Lighttitle taken from the Kae Tempest album, The Line Is A Curve, released in 2022. A piece where the two artists slam as one would read poetry, their voice stripped of any embellishment, simply in the service of the text. In the background, discreet synthetic emanations – discreet enough to let the words unfold at will. The result is sensitive, and resolutely magnetic. “I saw light in the buildings at night / I saw light in the windows as I passed them by / On the river. On the bridge. On the ledge / On the side of your face at the bar / It went dark”, and pronounces Kae Tempest, before being joined by Grian Chatten to close the title in chorus: “I saw light”.

“Full Way Round”, the electronic meeting of Leftfield and Grian Chatten

Jack of all trades, the word is not overused. Grian Chatten is far from confining himself to a single musical genre, and that’s a good thing. Before his explorations into rap or intimate ballads, he had tried (for a while) featuring) to electro. Spotted by the members of Leftfield, a group to be classified on the side of dance music, The Irishman was invited by the latter to lend his voice to the title Full Way Round, released in October 2022.

A “perfect collaboration between rhythms and good vibrations”, welcomed one of the members of Leftfield in a press release, full of praise for Grian Chatten. “[Sa] voice is a fluid journey that is felt and experienced, rather than analyzed. His energy and enthusiasm burst from the speakers. Every time I hear it, I remember the excitement in the studio when he recorded it. We do want to believe it.

“Vroom”, their collection of untraceable poetry

“Where can I find Fontaines D.C.’s Poetry Books ?”, we can read multiple times on forums lost in the limbo of the Internet, from Internet users visibly in need of satisfactory answers. Unfortunately, we ask ourselves the same question. It indeed seems that the five of Fontaines DC have taken up the pen to write together Vrooma collection of poetry inspired (among others) by their predecessors of the Beat Generation – a literary and cultural movement born in the 1950s across the Atlantic – and of which they were fervent when they met at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in Dublin, at the end of the 2010s.

It would have been published around 2017, shortly before the release of Liberty Belletheir first single and first success. Will they re-release Vroom one day? Another internet user claimed “their [avoir] asked this question” during an FAQ organized on the Reddit discussion forum, “they said they hope to re-release them at some point in the future…”. And to conclude: “Let’s hope they do!” We, all the same.