Fontaines D.C.

Before forming a band, Fontaines D.C. were a group of lads united by a shared passion for poetry. When Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan, Grian Chatten and Tom Coll met in 2014 at BIMM Dublin, they discovered almost immediately that they shared the same interest in the written word. What fascinated them most were the writers of the Beat Generation, from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg.
Even before giving life to Fontaines D.C., the five published two collections of poetry, “Vroom” and “Winding”. Those books aren't just a curious footnote preceding their musical debut, but the band's first true collective project: the place where they began to recognise each other, exchange ideas and build a shared language. “Me and the rest of the band became friends precisely by trading poems with each other – singer Grian Chatten has recalled – In Ireland, poetry is traditionally a language for the wealthier, more educated classes. We wanted to reclaim it, bring it back to ordinary people, to those without privilege. That said, if I go even further back in my memory, I find my father: he was the one who introduced me to poetry, I must have been about 10”.

From football stickers to poetry

For Grian Chatten, singer and principal lyricist for the Dublin band, the relationship with poetry had begun long before he met the other musicians. He was nine or ten when his father proposed a deal: for every poem learned by heart, he would get a pack of football stickers in return. The boy took the challenge very seriously and ended up memorising around fifteen poems. “Like a lot of kids that age, I dreamed of becoming a footballer, so I loved messing about with sticker albums. One day – Chatten recalled – my dad promised he'd buy me packs of stickers if I learned some poems by heart. The first was Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘From A Railway Carriage’: ‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, hedges and ditches…’. It describes a train journey with this rhythm that really makes you think of a train in motion, which fascinated me from the very first moment. When I recited it from memory, it was my first performance out loud. From that moment on I've known poetry isn't a language for elites: it's for everyone”.
The exercise profoundly changed the way Chatten perceived verse: no longer something to observe from a distance, but a living material, capable of entering the body and voice of whoever recites it. “When you learn a poem by heart, you enter into it. It becomes part of you”, he would later explain.

Verses written on receipts

This personal, everyday conception of poetry stayed with Chatten into adulthood too. While working in a luxury clothing shop, he would write verses on receipt paper, accepting that those words might get lost or never be read again. “I like having pockets full of scraps of paper I'll never read again. It makes me feel like everything good is still ahead of me, still in the future”.
Poetry thus became an instinctive, fleeting gesture, not necessarily meant for publication. An idea that would later flow into Fontaines D.C.'s own songwriting method: Chatten has often written lyrics directly in the studio, willing to let go of a good idea rather than treat it as something untouchable. “If you cling to something because you know it's a good idea, that implies you might not be able to do the same thing again tomorrow”.

From poems to songs

No poem from “Vroom” or “Winding” was directly turned into a Fontaines D.C. song, but the line between poetic and musical writing remained inevitably porous. “Television Screens”, included on the debut album “Dogrel“, started out as a poem before taking on its musical shape. Even the album's title carried a literary meaning. The word “doggerel” refers to crude, irregular verse, often deliberately lacking in refinement. It was the perfect description for an album that sought beauty in the streets, in everyday language and in the seemingly most ordinary aspects of Dublin life. The opening of “Big” immediately declared that visceral bond with the city: “Dublin in the rain is mine, a pregnant city with a Catholic mind”. Dublin became setting, character and mental space all at once, portrayed through images closer to urban poetry than to the conventions of rock songwriting.

The lesson of Patrick Kavanagh

The literary dimension became even more evident on the second album, “A Hero’s Death“. While writing it, Chatten looked above all to Patrick Kavanagh and his poem “Inniskeen Road: July Evening”, in which the poet watches a party being held in his own town while remaining excluded from it. At the end of the poem, Kavanagh declares: “I am the king of my own land”. That mix of alienation, pride and self-awareness would become one of the emotional cores of the record.
Kavanagh indeed remains the poet Chatten would recommend above all others: “Patrick Kavanagh. His ‘On Raglan Road’, a poem he also turned into a ballad with Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. It has some wonderful lines, probably the most beautiful words ever written”.
From the collections put together during their Dublin years to Kavanagh's influence on their records, poetry has thus remained at the heart of Fontaines D.C.'s identity. Even before post-punk, the gigs and international success, it was “Vroom” and “Winding” that brought the five Irish musicians together, giving them a shared language and pushing them to turn that literary kinship into a band.

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26/08/2026