‘Big’: Fontaines DC’s prophecy or a rejection of fame?
It takes a lot of guts to predict your own stardom, and it requires an awful lot of self-belief and drive to be able to come good on your promise of brilliance. Many nascent bands and artists do this without the goods to back it up, but ultimately, it’s their egos that get in the way of them truly hitting the big time, and their choice to indulge in self-aggrandising behaviour over honing their skills as songwriters is what renders them a laughing stock. If you want to make it in rock and stay for the long run, you need to have that wow factor – it’s as simple as that.
Fontaines DC’s decision to front their debut album Dogrel in 2019 with ‘Big’ was a bold one, but there is something remarkably prophetic about the way they would go on to bring this claim to reality over the course of their three subsequent albums. However, did they really mean to present themselves as cock-sure upstarts, or were they aiming to satirise those with lofty pipe dreams of mainstream success?
When they emerged from their hometown of Dublin in 2017 with their earliest singles, such as ‘Liberty Belle’ and ‘Hurricane Laughter’, there was definitely a swagger about the band. Still, the subject matter of the songs that frontman Grian Chatten was penning were fraught with real emotions and tales of their humble Irish backgrounds rather than full of arrogant posturing.
The repeated line in the chorus of “my childhood was small, but I’m gonna be big”, alongside the opening statement of “Dublin in the rain is mine” and the narrator’s “mind of ritz”, certainly makes things seem like they’ve got their eyes on the prize, but in reality, Chatten was actually voicing his concern for people who seem to believe they have the capacity to outgrow the city they grew up in.
In a press release accompanying the release of the video, Chatten declared that “we thought that great ambition was a sickness” before going on to explain that they “got Grian’s 11-year-old next-door neighbour to say it to you all because he’s got the presence of a hundred frontmen.”
During an interview with NME in 2018, they were even stunned by the fact that they’d already amassed a huge following despite not having released their debut album, appearing delighted that they could be so popular outside of their hometown. “We’re all from the back-arse of nowhere in Ireland,” Chatten commented, “And next thing you know we’re playing places like fuckin’ San Francisco. That’s mental.”
Fast-forward five years from ‘Big’ and the band are showing no signs of relenting in their conquest of the world, although it has seen them flirt with many different stylistic changes in both music and presentation. They’re no longer the grey-clad post-punk poets that they once were, and have seen themselves shift towards an assortment of shoegaze, dream pop and gothic rock while donning dayglo tracksuits in press shots.
While it all seems a far cry from their origins, they’ve not forgotten about their roots but rather found themselves at peace with the fact that things have changed significantly for them since the early days, and they are keen to explore new things. “I accessed that part of myself very thoroughly around the time that we wrote it,” Chatten told Billboard in an interview to promote latest album Romance, “So I don’t know if I will be hungry to access that kind of thing, in the same way, ever again.”
