Imagine being plucked from today into a yesteryear, 1916 in Dublin, Ireland to be exact. This during the Easter Rebellion where for six days an armed insurrection against British rule was fought, ending in the internment of 1,800 and the hanging execution of 16. This is the premise behind A Lucid Dream penned by the phenom Fontaines D.C. (Dublin City), a group consisting of lead singer Grian Chatten, guitarists Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan III (bass), and Tom Coll on drums. The song’s parent album, A Hero’s Dream, being an overall homage to the aforementioned uprising and a balancing-pivot against their debut album Dogrel that was a critical success, even being nominated for a Mercury (Music) Award. “We became representative of some kind of thing, be it Dublin, poetry, or rock and roll. Far be it for us to actually claim any of this ourselves, but we were raised to this by the media et al“, said Conor Deegan in his interview with Hero Magazine (here).
“I was there,
When the rain changed direction,
And fled to play tricks with your hair, overlooking them, there,
And it’s all coming back,
And you’re prowling the track, like a cat on the back of a chair…”
The song begins with jangly-guitar and the snare drum beat of a marching cadence with a sparsity-filling gloriously druggery-fueled front stage bass, followed just often enough by a wonderfully dream-catchy drum riff captured in hyper-stepped video imagery. Lead singer Grian wanders a modern landscape superimposed over footage of the Dublin GPO (General Post Office) after being brutally shelled by an English gunboat nested on the river Liffey while a newspaper proudly-proclaims “IRISH WAR NEWS – THE IRISH REPUBLIC“. The lyrics sound as that of a leader’s gloomily-shouted orders replete with reminders suggestive of the listener’s spirited-time-machine role in a past where he was or wasn’t a participant, where he is or isn’t an English subject and is or isn’t actively in pursuit of realizing his country’s freedom from oppression at risk of one’s life.
“And the bulletin board, was shot up like a ward full of junk,
And all kinds of despair,
And it’s all coming back,
And the main thing is that the rain (reign?) changed direction,
Before you were there…“
The group, album, and song as one seem to extoll an impulse to rethink who one is and what one stands for… and that one should ne’er forget either.
- Fontaines D.C. music can be bought here and from Apple here, listened to on Spotify here, and followed on Facebook here
The Cranberries, Zombies does it for me…. btw my Grandad and his Brothers stood with Collins
And here’s where I admit I had no idea that’s what the song Zombie was about — love it. Amazing lineage as well. Thank you for sharing!
These sorts of struggles are in your bones and you can never really let go, here’s my twopenth a childhood reflection from the 70s at the height of the ‘troubles’ on mainland UK…..
“Fuck Off Irish Bastards” was painted on the living room wall,
The words were very big when I was young and small,
They taught me to speak English and a little bit of French,
Having an Irish accent implied wrongful intent,
They pulled out all our teeth and plugged us into the mains,
They said it’d cure our illness,
They fried our fucking brains.
*the Irish were disproportionately represented in the number of people detained in mental hospital under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 1969 and given ECT, which, initially, included the removal of your teeth to prevent biting during the induced seizure *
Jesus. It’s a wonder that kids today think things are hard and yet the more I learn of history, the more brutal the world seems to have been in the past.
trade winds….
https://youtu.be/sc85qQ-TKIU
strangely, and serendipitously but a little off the point to make the point, I mentioned Bikini Kill to one of the lads where I am, he being an old school shoe maker ‘The Last Shoe Maker’ from California and his sister is friends with the grrrrls from Bikini Kill – so when the words in Zombie says “it’s in your heads” that’s how ‘we’ drag stuff around when our hearts, beit from yesteryear or today remain, always connected to each other….. simple really, or I am finding it this way… patriarchy and misogyny are a massive fucking problem, so my position is ‘not in my name’
for the history try these links, the first a chronicle of fighting that had always been rooted in land disputes going back centuries, see the history of the ‘white boys’ so called because of the colour of their smocks (my family line traces back to them too from the O’Fearchair) and the second, witness testimony from the people who were there….
1.
https://www.IrishCentral.com
2. https://www.militaryarchives.ie.collections/online-collections/bureau-of-military-history-1913-1921/witnesses/?letter=f
As a completely different matter the search for the link to the White Boys also brought up Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah by Bikini Kill – absolutely brilliant….
Roberta Flack released Trade Winds as a B-side in 75 before Rod Stewart’s cover –
https://youtu.be/PWNWOoBTuiY
Japan first released Ghosts in 77
https://youtu.be/2GCB6Fyn58M
Bowie released Wild is the Wind during the same economic upheavals
https://youtu.be/7nDOMCRdB9w
The Fontaine’s DC, I guess, could be seen within a similar context ie a new Taxi Driver ‘are you looking at me’ moment in time….. thoughts?
Hi !!! I have nominated you For THE OUTSTANDING BLOGGER AWARD!
Thank you so much Carla! You are very kind for nominating me. 🙂
Thank you for reading my blog!☺✨