“There’s a really innocent beauty in no one caring about the name of your band, or no one knowing the name of your band,” guitarist Conor Curley reflects. “We were the only five people kind of propping that up.” A lot has changed for Fontaines D.C. in the three-and-a-bit years since they started releasing music together. Hell, a lot has changed for them in the one-and-a-bit year since they released their first record. Top 10 charting, Mercury Prize-nominated, and album of the year lauded, it’s hard to imagine a time when no one knew the group’s name. “Whenever we’d meet people, we’d talk about us being in a band,” he recalls. “I suppose we don’t really have to do that anymore.”
“There’s a feeling of conspiracy, like Curley was saying, when you’re starting off with a band,” frontman Grian Chatten agrees. “Nobody knows you, and you have that belief that you’re amazing.” It’s been a turbulent few years for the Dublin City outfit, but this belief in their own creativity is something the band – completed by Conor Deegan III, Carlos O’Connell, and Tom Coll – have never lost. “It’s just you, and you’re driving around in a van, and you feel like you’ve got a secret that no one else knows about,” Grian fondly reminisces. “That’s something that you have. That’s a particular magic that’s exclusive to the beginning, to the formative years of a band.”
Driving around in a van to play shows around the world, across the continent, even across the country is something of a distant dream right now (Fontaines D.C. currently have tour dates scheduled for next year), but the magic they felt when they did it the first time is, wonderfully, in no short supply – interestingly enough that’s at least in part because of the fact they haven’t been able to tour. “We have that [magic] again with the fact that we’ve been sitting with this new album,” Grian enthuses. “There’s that element again of the five of us being charged with this knowledge that no one else knows.”
