Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC: ‘I only started to realise over the last couple years that I was quite weird in school’

Grian Chatten and I are both Dubliners who reside in London; Chatten in Camden, me about four miles to the west, in Kensal Rise. I have interviewed Chatten and his band Fontaines DC several times in my old job at BBC Radio 1, but I’ve never had a chance for a one-on-one conversation until now. Chatten’s first solo record, Chaos For the Fly, is released to the world at the end of June. There’s much to discuss.

I suggest we meet at Hampstead Heath, a huge sprawling green space in north London that is home to the city’s highest point. After meeting at the train station, we enter the park. I show him the lake – or pond as they like to call it here – where I swim regularly, and then we walk through some woodland and into a clearing, where we stomp up a hill to an empty bench and sit down. It’s a bright, blustery May day. The heath stretches away below us, scraggy and wild in contrast to the modular cityscape in the distance. This place is famous for its views of the London skyline. You can take it all in here. You can breathe. I unpack a flask of coffee and a bottle of water from my bag, and we settle in.

In the last three years, Fontaines DC have made more of an impression than most bands could wish for in a lifetime. They released their debut album Dogrel in April 2019, winning the hearts of music critics, old punk rockers and a new generation of disillusioned youth all at once. Dogrel was nominated for the Choice music prize and the Mercury prize. A year later came A Hero’s Death which gained the band a Grammy nomination. Then their third album Skinty Fia, exploring feelings of dislocation both from their home country and any semblance of normality that they had before, debuted at number one in both Ireland and the UK, and won them a Brit award. In an industry dominated by TikTok viral moments and manufactured dance pop, where it’s harder and harder for bands to survive let alone thrive, Fontaines DC’s success is exciting, anomalous, and for lovers of rock music, reassuring. The speed of their ascent has been remarkable.

This has made for a wild few years for the boys in the band. Chatten has been on tour constantly. He hasn’t had a chance to “mine and find the roots of London” until recently. While I’ve been planted here for more than 20 years, Chatten has been here for more like three, after moving over during lockdown.

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We take in the view. I tell him I’m drawn to high places. London is so vast, so endless and edgeless, that to try to imagine myself, or feel grounded, in it is nearly impossible, but when I go somewhere where I can see it, even from a distance, I can get a sense of myself in it.

“For most Irish people that I’ve met, it’s far too much freedom for the first while,” Chatten says. “There’s a monstrous freedom to it, and then, once you master that freedom, then all of that freedom is yours.”

Did he find it overwhelming at the start? And was he more conscious of his Irishness?

“One hundred per cent. I was protective of it. I dreaded the idea of my accent softening. I think I wore it a lot more on my sleeve, maybe I started to covet it in my songwriting as well.”

So there was a feeling of defensiveness?

“That’s literally what it was. Let’s call ourselves Paddy before anyone else does.”

You wouldn’t need to do much digging to realise how central Dublin is to the identity of Fontaines DC. The DC stands for Dublin city. Chatten’s singing voice is resolutely Dublin. He has a tattoo of the word DEADLY on his forearm, and a small shamrock adorning his wrist. The opening track of their debut album, Big, begins with the words: “Dublin in the rain is mine, a pregnant city with a Catholic mind.”

It’s quite something as a Dubliner, when you hear a crowd of thousands shouting that line at the top of their voices in London. I can only imagine what it must feel like for the band when they play that song in Buenos Aires or Osaka.

Chatten is captivating as a frontman, pacing around the stage, staring out beyond the heads. I remember reading an interview with him where he described the lead-up to walking on stage as that feeling before vomiting, and the actual gig itself as the sensation of vomiting. His body becomes so tense that his toes curl up, and after the show his feet really hurt.

In March, Fontaines DC completed their longest and most draining touring cycle yet; what their tour manager called “a world and a half tour”, taking in the UK twice, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and America. For Australia and Japan, the band had a stand-in guitarist, Cathal MacGabhann, while Carlos O’Connell was off for his baby’s birth. As an outsider turned insider, MacGabhann made some astute observations about Chatten’s performances.

[ Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten: ‘I’m in an emotional flux’ ]

“He said he didn’t think many people realised that I don’t learn the lines and learn the moves,” Chatten says. “I have to draw something out of myself every night. There’s a huge emotional tax to pay for me every night.”

The American leg of the tour was particularly hard, he says.

“Often when bands like us go to America, there’s a real reduction in terms of the crew, the size of the bus . . . we were on a single decker, a really small bus, on the road for six weeks and it was really warm . . . it was quite intense towards the end, and things in my personal life started to be compromised as a result.”

Relationships? I proffer.

“Yeah. Difficult to nurture – you know?”

It was in hotel rooms on that American tour that the songs for Chatten’s solo album, Chaos For the Fly, started to show themselves. He was able to find a two-week gap between tours where he went into the studio with the band’s long-time collaborator Dan Carey and record the album. It’s the first album he has ever co-produced, and presents an altogether different side of the Grian Chatten we know as frontman of Fontaines DC.

In contrast to the heavy guitars that the band’s fans will be familiar with, this album is sonically light and bright, the music lush and expansive, filled with picked guitars and orchestral flourishes, and backing vocals from Chatten’s fiancée Georgie Jesson. The melodies are simple and uncomplicated. There is a tenderness to his voice that feels if not new, then more exposed. He sings right up to the microphone, lyrics that skew darker, giving the album an ominous undertone that he describes as “like a horror movie with a hyper-real colour palette”.

I only started to realise over the last couple years that I was quite weird. I found it really difficult to make friends in school, and I felt like people spoke a language that I couldn’t speak

Is there a thread that runs through the songs in terms of things he wanted to say or needed to express?

“It’s very much like a fantasy and imagination and introversion and retreating,” he says, “because I think that that’s what I needed to nurture when I was on the tour. A lot of it was quite misanthropic and bitter . . . I was really drawn towards darkness.”

You can hear this darkness on All of the People, a song that sits in the middle of the album. It is Chatten’s favourite track, and the one that scares him the most.

“People are scum I will say it again/Don’t let anyone tell you that/They wanna be your friend/They just wanna get close enough to/Take the final shot/They will celebrate the things that make you who you’re not.”

“It feels nearly embarrassing how crass and straightforward it is,” he says. “But that’s just what came out of my mouth and I trust the fact that I feel like that . . . I don’t really want to live with those feelings, so I needed to put them into music. I’m grateful towards that song for doing what it did for me, I think it drew some poison from me, writing that.”

I’m struck how songs seem to act as documents of their writer’s place in time. How listening back to them must be akin to looking at old photos, the writer viscerally brought back to a previous incarnation of themselves.

[ Fontaines DC: ‘We’ve no licence to speak for Ireland’ ]

“Yeah, totally,” Chatten agrees. “As soon as I started feeling mentally better, those lyrics started ageing, not ageing in a negative sense, but they started to look like someone else. Which is a good thing.”

Chatten wrote his first song when he was nine years old, about a dream he had where he stole something from a shop and ran away. He grew up in Skerries in north Dublin with his mum and dad and younger brother.

His father, a musician, is one of five siblings, and all the time as he was growing up, guitars would be passed around the room, harmonicas played, family members singing in harmony.

“They’d all know how to play every kind of tune, just by picking up the guitar. That was my first club that I was trying to bang my head into.”

He had his mum to thank for helping him find a way in.

“My ma woke me up on a school night and got me out of bed and brought me downstairs. She’d just bought The Cure Greatest Hits, and she stuck it on the CD player and started dancing around the room. I think with the visual aid of her dancing, I understood The Cure.”

That experience led him to learn the baseline to The Cure’s song The Lovecats, and to perform it in front of the family music session.

“I remember them tapping each other on the shoulder and going ‘f**k off, look at that!’ And me making loads of mistakes then as a result.”

What did his da think of him starting to play? Was he encouraging?

“He was tough in a way that I really respect now and I’m really grateful for. I remember I used to come to him with a couplet that I’d written as a lyric idea. I’d spend ages in my room writing it and come back downstairs and say, ‘Look at this [couple] of lines I’ve written’. And he’d say, ‘Come back to me with a full song. Two lines is nothing.’”

I ask him about school. What was he like?

“I only started to realise over the last couple years that I was quite weird. I found it really difficult to make friends, and I felt like people spoke a language that I couldn’t speak . . . I remember those years as like banging my head against the door trying to gain access to a room that was locked, you know, and I just didn’t know how to do it.”

[ Fontaines DC: ‘Ireland could really benefit from a socialist government’ ]

It didn’t help that he found every subject that wasn’t English and music difficult to wrap his head around. “I’d get really frustrated and emotional, and I didn’t understand things . . . the words became blurry.”

But in his mid-teens, when he started playing in front of people at school, the doors to those locked social circles magically began to open.

“I left school a lot more popular and secure in myself than I began,” he says.

After Skerries Community College, he went to the music college BIMM in Dublin. It was there that he met his bandmates in Fontaines DC. BIMM was a place where he felt his IQ go up immediately. I suggest maybe that was because he felt validated for the first time. He was seen. He agrees.

“I think I became brave for a couple of years with songwriting. I fell more in love with it than ever, and became really obsessed by it.”

He also made some “absolutely terrible music”. Ah, but that’s a very important part of the journey, I say.

“When was your period of scattering your ideas everywhere?” he asks me.

I tell him that it was also while I was at university. I felt a symbiosis between studying English literature and discovering clubbing. I was writing poetry and essays and studying Irvine Welsh and contemporary Scottish literature. But I spent the weekend in clubs. He mulls this over.

“I get such a distinct, kind feeling from that. You use these things to contextualise life or to look at life through for a while, I think.”

I agree. That time of my life was wild, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free. I got swept away.

“So where were you living then?” he asks.

I tell him about living in Belfast. How it was a completely different Ireland than I knew, because I was very much in the minority, being from the South. How sound everyone was, how I made friends for life.

How does he feel now about living in London?

“I love it now, to be honest,” he says. “Do you?”

I laugh here, because for the last year or so I have been thinking of Ireland non-stop, obsessing about the possibility of moving my family back. His question blindsides me because in all this thinking of Ireland, I had forgotten to think about London. I tell him, that yes, I do love it here. This is definitely home. Dublin is home, but London is also home and it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with that. It helps when you have kids who grow up and call it home, I say. But I love the life I’ve got here.

We are joined by an enthusiastic dog who drops her ball on the grass by our feet. We take turns to throw it for her. I ask Chatten what the lads thought when he said he was going to do a solo album.

“Um, we haven’t really talked about it much. They haven’t heard it.”

I’m surprised by this. Is the band in a good place?

“We definitely are,” he replies. “I think it just feels like we’ve been through the wars together at this point. I saw a few of them yesterday and we’re always really happy to see each other but in a kind of like – I know every kind of band says this but – a family kind of way, you know?”

You do each other’s heads in as well, like family does, I suggest.

“With the flick of a finger we’ll do each other’s heads in, yeah. But there’s also an intense loyalty that supersedes most circumstances.”

I tell him I think it takes a certain strength in a band for the lead singer to go off and do their own thing and for the rest of the band not to feel threatened. Are they not curious to hear the music?

“I have so much respect for their taste – they are the people that I’m most shy about listening to it to be honest. I was mixing it a bit on tour, and they’d walk backstage and I’d be listening to a new mix on a speaker and I’d have to turn it off immediately.”

I don’t have any desire to reach for the stars or chart or anything like that. I made this record because I feel like I have more of myself to say and to give

I understand his logic. It’s the same with my brothers and sisters reading my novels, I say. It’s too much to bear.

“When friends and family come to gigs and I can see them . . . that wrecks my head sometimes . . . Even if I’m on the other side of the world and I could use a friend. I think I become scared of somebody failing to marry the person I am offstage and the person I am onstage. Seeing that as a disparity or as fake, I suppose. I feel exposed. I feel like somebody here knows my secret. There is no secret.”

But it would be very understandable, I suggest, in order to tour the way he does quite intensely, if he were to inhabit some sort of bigger version of himself on stage?

“Totally. But similarly, I think I’m probably underperforming when I’m home, when I’m walking down the street. And I think that both aspects of me are relevant, they probably feed into one another. I always get asked by people who don’t know me very well, like, what’s the story, you’re really shy in real life?”

I don’t find Chatten shy. I don’t sense any nervousness about him at all. He seems gentle, affable, thoughtful, easy-going, and unlike other lead singers of bands I’ve met, genuinely comfortable not being the loudest person in the room. There’s a sense that he knows and trusts his own mind, He tells me that he only ever wanted the album cover for Chaos For the Fly to be blue. That he wears blue every single day. I laugh at that. He just likes blue then?

“I do just like blue. I’m kind of one of those people who decides very early on in life what kind of clothes they like. And then that’s it, I’m like that’s me now.”

What does he want for this album?

“I don’t have any desire to reach for the stars or chart or anything like that. I made this record because I feel like I have more of myself to say and to give. I probably will always feel like that, but I like the idea of casting a little light out into the darkness and seeing if anyone grabs on to it.”

When I ask him how he thinks this album will define him, looking back in years to come, he tells me about one of his favourite books, Stoner, a 1965 novel by the American writer John Edward Williams.

“The whole book is about an apparently unremarkable life, of someone who’s never stepped outside their comfort zone or challenged themselves enough and lived very quietly in their own head, unexpressed. In the last page he is dying on his couch and he looks over and he sees this unremarkable book that he published once in his life, 20 years ago. And he picks up the book and he sees that he’s there, he’s real; that he has lived, basically. There’s evidence of his having lived. That’s how I feel about the solo record.”

[ Fontaines DC get political, slamming ‘the gall of Fine Gael and the fail of Fianna Fáil’ ]

And what has writing and recording the album done for him, now he’s talking about it? Has it helped him, as a musician, as a writer, as a person?

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s rearranged my chemical structure in a positive way. I feel sturdy. I feel less like water. I feel like I can plant my feet in the ground and say, here I am. I’m in Hampstead Heath and my name’s Grian Chatten. What I’d really like for that to mean is that I can be a better, more consistent friend and family member and partner.”

Has his da heard the new album?

“Yeah, he was into it. I think he was worried for me.”

As a parent, I think that would be a very natural thing to feel.

“Yeah, but his knuckles would be white, ready to be defensive on my behalf at the same time. He’s the kind of lad that would send a horse’s head to a journalist, if they gave me a bad rating.”

I’d better watch myself so, I say, and we laugh. The dog has gone now, trotting after her owner. The trees sway slowly behind us. We look out to the city of London glimmering on the horizon, cranes turning slowly over the buildings below. Then we walk off down the hill.

Grian Chatten’s solo album, Chaos For the Fly, is out on Partisan Records on June 30th. Annie Macmanus’s new novel, The Mess We’re In, is out now, published by Wildfire