gloomy, melancholic, raw, vigorous

Fontaines D.C. ~ A Lucid Dream

Imagine being plucked from today into yesteryear, 1916 in Dublin, Ireland to be exact. During the Easter Rebellion, an armed insurrection against British rule was fought for six days, 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, is an overall homage to the aforementioned uprising and a balancing pivot against their debut album Dogrel which 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 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

10 thoughts on “Fontaines D.C. ~ A Lucid Dream”

  2. 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 *

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      1. 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’

  3. 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….

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