Fontaines DC: The Boys In The Better Band - Bonus Arena review
‘HAUNTING AND VISCERAL’: Fontaines DC at Bonus Arena
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Fontaines DC at Hull’s Bonus Arena - review
Fontaines DC first popped up on my radar with their debut single Boys In the Better Land, a fierce and heady rush of Jonathan Richman Roadrunner-style guitars that featured a stand-out line about someone having “a face like a James Joyce novel”. Both the literary reference and the singer’s accent immediately placed them in Ireland’s capital city - the “DC” referred to in their name. Dublin has a grand tradition of knocking out a diverse range of successful bands, from Thin Lizzy, The Boomtown Rats, to B*Witched, U2, and My Bloody Valentine. In more recent years, Ireland’s capital has been a fertile breeding ground for the type of boy bands loved by pre-teen girls and sentimental pensioners. The type of fellows who perch on stools and murder old time swing tunes. The Boys In The Wetter Bands, if you will.
Fontaines DC have no such truck with any of that nonsense. They stroll on stage and take up their positions in front of a stark and simple backdrop of horizontal primary colour lights, their name hung high above them in a vaguely Gaelic looking font. The set is kickstarted by Nabokov, all grinding industrial bass and sheet metal guitar, the band back-lit by swooping, strobing spotlights. “I did you a favour, I bled myself dry” intones singer Grian. As openers go, it’s pretty impressive. Haunting and visceral. Like being hurled into a poetry reading in a wind tunnel.
Visually speaking, Fontaines DC are a something of a band of two halves. Stage left, we have a stationary curly-topped bass player, flanked by a magnificently sleazy Bad Seed-style guitarist with greased back pink hair. The former could pass for one of Captain’s Beefheart’s Magic Band circa 1969. The other fella wouldn’t look out of place in a house band from a Tarantino movie, all snake-hip slouch and Elvis sneers. Both of them are sporting voluminous pin-tucked trousers, the likes of which I haven’t seen since New Romantics last walked the earth. Stage right we have afore-mentioned vocalist Grian, who reminds me of Ian Curtis, if Ian Curtis had played five-a-side football on a weekend with his mates. The other guitarist and the drummer are similarly casually attired. As a collective, they look like someone threw a load of random groups into a tombola machine and spun the wheel.
Musically, though, they are one mightily unified machine. Their sound is distinctly postpunk with echoes of The Cure, Joy Division and, dare I say it, early U2. For years, Dublin’s most famous sons hung over the rest of their city’s musical output like a vaguely unwelcome ghost. Any band using heavy guitar effects or employing any form of earnest beseeching poetics would immediately be thrown in the bin marked copy-cat. But enough time has passed for such concerns to no longer matter. The kids going berserk in the mosh pit probably have no idea of who U2 are or where, beyond being some po-faced band from Live Aid who your Dad used to like.
The rest of the set builds and builds and builds, piling on the intensity. The songs are largely culled from their latest album Skinty Fia with the occasional old favourite thrown in for good measure. I Don’t Belong sounds astonishing, a brooding paen to alienation delivered by a mournful choirboy trapped in a thresher. Boys From The Better Land provokes a fresh hysteria of flailing limbs down the front. The set closes with the euphoric I Love You and red confetti rains down from above, each piece emblazoned with that very message. Nice touch.
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Fontaines DC clearly provoke deep passions in their audience. One lad I met afterwards had been in tears at seeing his heroes in the flesh for the first time. Set-lists were torn from the stage and clutched to hearts like treasure. Another kid showed me his phone, which he’d slung up on the stage with the message for Grian: GIVE ME A SELFIE AND I’LL GET A FONTAINES DC TATTOO. The singer duly dropped his mic mid-gig and obliged. The NME recently called Fontaines DC “The Best Band in The World”. If they’re not now they very well could be. There are certainly a few thousand people in Hull who would agree.