We all know how the Irish saved civilization—and if you don’t know the story, look for Thomas Cahill’s excellent tome on the subject—but what about rock ’n’ roll? From Van Morrison and Them to Rory Gallagher and Taste, or Thin Lizzy to the Pogues, U2 to the Cranberries, My Bloody Valentine to Snow Patrol, Irish rockers have given the British blues explosion a run for its silver, carving out an unbroken line from soul and blues-rock all the way to hardcore punk and ultramod art-rock, and they’ve done it in large measure while hewing close to the staunchly Irish traditions of myth, poetry, storytelling, rebel yells, and romantic longing.
It’s way too soon to refer to the five 20-something lads of Fontaines D.C. as rock saviors (they’d scoff at the prospect anyway), but Skinty Fia, the band’s third slab since their 2019 Mercury Prize-nominated debut, Dogrel, has rapidly turned up the critical heat, going straight to No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart upon release. The leadoff single “Jackie Down the Line,” a righteously gloomy but beat-driven rocker, sets the tone for the album, with frontman Grian Chatten transforming himself into the song’s dark narrator (“I will stone you, I’ll alone you”) as guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell mesh together in a jangly, echo-laced interplay of crafty three-note chords, 12-string acoustic filigrees, and tremolo-washed sheets of sound. Add the locked rhythm section of Conor “Deego” Deegan (bass) and Tom Coll (drums) behind them, and the band’s tightness, augmented by their dogged desire to keep experimenting, instantly permeates every song.
Fontaines D.C. - Jackie Down The Line (Official video)
“I think when we first met, we were mainly just songwriters,” observes Curley, reminiscing on their early moments together. “I mean, obviously I’m a guitar player, but I saw myself more as a songwriter, and I think the other lads did as well. So the first album was the culmination of trying to be aware of our abilities, and keep things raw and exciting. We were playing 100-cap venues in Dublin, so there was no point in trying to overextend ourselves.
“After that, we felt we had more strings to our bow, in terms of the songs that we knew we could do. We went down more of an introspective path, and definitely got into more psychedelic music with the second album [A Hero’s Death]. And now it’s just a combination of all that. I think something that defines us as a band is that we never want to sit still in a sound. We’re always trying to be inspired by different things.”
Fontaines D.C.’s three albums were all produced by Dan Carey. The band’s first two albums were recorded at Carey’s London home studio, but for the third, Fontaines decided on a change of scenery, opting to record Skinty Fia at Angelic Studio in the English countryside.
The band also stuck with producer Dan Carey (Black Midi, Geese, Wet Leg, and plenty more), graduating from Carey’s home studio in London, where they recorded their first two albums, to the larger Angelic Studio complex in the idyllic English countryside, near Oxfordshire. But before they even took up residence, each band member made the most of the prolonged pandemic lockdown to flesh out detailed demos, either working in Logic or with handheld recorded snippets of vocals and guitar. Armed with well-prepped songs and the prospect of working with Carey in entirely new surroundings, as O’Connell describes it, opened up possibilities that led to a bigger, more multi-layered sound.
“What I love about Dan is his process is in two stages,” O’Connell says. “We were in a bigger studio this time, so he wanted to take advantage of that. There’s the live guts of the recording [from the floor], and that’s just getting the sound right at the start. We spent a couple of days gaining up all the inputs, so when it hits the desk, it’s pretty much a very balanced mix. Then it’s just about playing well and having the songs arranged properly so they work.
“The first album was very much in a fighting mode, with the two guitars EQ’ed the same and just smashing off each other. On the second one, we learned to play together a little better.” —Conor Curley
“And then at the second stage, we do overdubs. We rarely add new parts, but we’ll redo the parts we have, either with a different instrument or treated differently.”
Both Curley and O’Connell also brought some of their earliest influences to bear, including the slashing surf guitar leads of the Birthday Party’s Rowland S. Howard, along with the snakebitten Fender Mustang kick of Kurt Cobain. “We also played a bit more with a blend,” O’Connell says, “like what happened with rock and roll and electronic music in the ’90s, you know? Primal Scream, Death in Vegas, even U2 went through that phase, but they all used actual synthesizers and drum machines. Our idea was to make it sound like that with our own instruments.”
Carlos O’Connell’s Gear
Carlos O’Connell bought his ’67 Fender Mustang online without knowing it was a 3/4-scale smaller model, but it’s become one of his main road warriors.
Photo by Simon Reed
Guitars
- 2019 Johnny Marr Jaguar
- ’67 Fender Mustang 3/4 scale
- 50th Anniversary Fender Jazzmaster [prototype]
- Martin J12-15 with L.R. Baggs M80 active humbucker
- Seagull Artist Studio 12 Burst with L.R. Baggs Lyric acoustic microphone system
Amps
- Fender ’68 Custom Twin Reverb
- Fender ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
- 1975 Fender Deluxe Reverb (used only at Angelic Studio)
- THD Electronics Hot Plate
Effects
- MXR M133 Micro Amp
- Electro-Harmonix Soul Food
- Strymon Lex Rotary
- Moogerfooger MF Flange
- Moose Electronics Cosmic Tremorlo
- Moose Electronics Reverb
- Boss TR-2 Tremolo
- Electro-Harmonix Op Amp Big Muff Pi
- Electro-Harmonix POG
- Boss GE-7 Graphic Equalizer
- Dunlop Volume (X)
- EarthQuaker Devices Life Pedal
- Vein-Tap Murder One Killswitch
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Burly Slinkys
- Dunlop Tortex .60 mm
The album’s title track “Skinty Fia” (roughly translated, “the damnation of the deer”) delivers on the idea. Wielding his trusty ’67 Mustang through Carey’s own ’75 Fender Deluxe Reverb, O’Connell avails himself of a chaotic wash of tremolo (aided by a reverb pedal from Dublin-based Moose Electronics, which he unconventionally places first in the effects chain, ahead of his overdrives) to propel the song’s relentless, hypnotic churn. Meanwhile, in the left channel—throughout the album, each guitarist occupies his own side of the stereo image—Curley knifes into the mix with an echo-drenched melody on his Johnny Marr Jaguar, routed into a Fender Twin Reverb, to accentuate Chatten’s menacing vocal, while Deego and Coll hammer out a beat that recalls Nine Inch Nails with a thick, dub-style low end.
“I think we’re trying to be more patient, and more conscious of the texture,” Curley says, describing how he and O’Connell have worked together to refine their sound. Like most bands with a two-guitar attack (the well-known Irish precedent of Thin Lizzy comes to mind), the symbiosis comes with time, practice, and subtle lines of communication. “The first album was very much in a fighting mode,” he continues, “with the two guitars EQ’d the same and just smashing off each other. On the second one, we learned to play together a little better. We’re still working on it, and sometimes we still try to become as one almost, when the song needs it, but I think now we’ve learned to fit in with how we’re EQing everything. It feels really good.”
Fontaines D.C. - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)
The confidence shines through on Skinty Fia, especially when the two axe-slingers choose to embrace a little sonic chaos. On the dark drum-and-bass-influenced opening track “In ár gCroíthe go deo” (“In Our Hearts Forever”), O’Connell tees up another locked tremolo effect, eventually morphing into an otherworldly chorus effect, mirrored by Curley, of what sounds like distant dogs howling. “It’s only at the end where my guitar comes in,” Curley clarifies. “I’m just following the bass with the chords, at a very high frequency, and with delays at the end of every phrase. I hit my [Industrialectric] Echo Degrader, and that’s what really sends it into a spin.”
On the Curley-penned “Nabokov,” the layers of noise lean heavily on classic shoegaze and dub, with Curley again availing himself of the Echo Degrader. “That pedal is so unpredictable, it’s almost like it doesn’t sound the same every time you use it. I’ve been using that and an RV-7 [by Digitech Hardwire] for gated and reverse reverb. There were definitely a lot more shoegazey elements that we were trying to get to, and, obviously, if you start talking about Kevin Shields or even Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins, the stuff they did, to me, is almost unreachable, but if you try, you might end up with something new anyway.”
Conor Curley’s Gear
Conor Curley often toggles between this ’66 Fender Coronado II and a Johnny Marr Jaguar.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
Guitars
- 2019 Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar
- ’66 Fender Coronado II
- Fylde 12-string (loan from Richard Hawley)
Amps
- Fender ’68 Custom Twin Reverb
- Lazy J (used only at Angelic Studio)
- THD Electronics Hot Plate
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Burly Slinkys
- Dunlop Tortex .60 mm
Effects
- Industrialectric Echo Degrader
- DigiTech Hardwire RV-7 Stereo Reverb
- Moose Electronics Reverb
- Moose Electronics Delay
- Strymon Sunset
- Strymon Deco
- ThorpyFX Chain Home
- Electro-Harmonix Nano POG
- Dunlop Volume (X)
By contrast, both guitarists reached for a 12-string acoustic on a pair of songs: Curley on the aforementioned “Jackie Down the Line,” and O’Connell on the smoldering groover “Roman Holiday.” Oddly enough, the Fontaines acquired the guitar, a beautifully finished Fylde custom 12-string, from British crooner and troubadour Richard Hawley, who met the band on a recent jaunt in Sheffield. “We were struggling to find a really nice sound on a 12-string,” O’Connell says, “so it was like, let me just text him. He was really excited about being a part of it and lending us the guitar, and it was magic. Just a beautiful guitar. Someday I’ll get one, but you can never play it live because it’s just too precious.”
And on tour, Fontaines comes across as anything but precious. Chatten often prowls the stage like a wounded animal between verses, wielding the mic stand like a cudgel and seeming to goad the band into wilder forays of sonic exploration. At a recent packed house in Brooklyn, Curley and O’Connell whipped “Too Real,” one of their earliest singles from Dogrel, into a feedback-laden, psych-rock deluge, while an encore of “Nabokov” made the most of the dueling washes of noise that each guitarist can deliver, with precision, from either side of the stage. As a unit, they’re brash, tough, and confident—typically young, and typically Irish.
Carlos O’Connell utilizes his prototype 50th Anniversary Fender Jazzmaster when he’s going for a deep, low-end guitar tone.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
“We’ve found refuge within each other, and within our identity,” O’Connell observes when asked about the band’s recent, and inevitable, move to London. Chatten in particular, as frontman and lyricist, has been outspoken in interviews about some of the prejudices he’s encountered, a sentiment that inspired the song “In ár gCroíthe go deo,” which pays tribute to an Irish woman in Coventry who was initially denied permission to bury her late mother with the Irish inscription on her gravestone.
“We also found that accumulated frustration with a very ignorant misunderstanding of Ireland from Britain’s point of view, which started to piss us off quite a bit,” O’Connell reveals. “But then we wrote this album, and ever since, it’s starting to open up a lot. It’s given me the dream of what I thought I would find in London: a place where we’re more anonymous and where there’s less expected from us, you know?”
“We were struggling to find a really nice sound on a 12-string, so it was like, let me just text him [Richard Hawley].” —Carlos O’Connell
Surely those expectations will grow in urgency as time goes on, but for now Fontaines D.C. seems content to ride the lightning. “There’s been a lot of self-discovery along the way,” Curley says. “There’s always inspiration to be found in Irish art and culture, and we’re also massively into Irish traditional music. Me and Tom got really into Paul Brady and Andy Irvine and Planxty, and we wrote a good few Irish ballads. At one point, we actually thought of doing Skinty Fia as a double album, which I guess might’ve seemed a little gratuitous. Hopefully those songs will see the light of day in a different context.
“But now that we’re back on tour, whatever happens, I think we’re definitely not gonna take any of it for granted. We’re just trying to enjoy all the things we see, and trying to put on really good shows.”
YouTube It
In this pandemic-era livestream, Fontaines D.C. plays a half dozen songs from their Grammy-nominated sophomore album, A Hero’s Death [2020].
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On this episode, we’re thrilled to be joined by Chris Shiflett—best known to you as the host of Shred with Shifty or as the Foo Fighters’s foremost expert on Randy Rhoads. Since growing up with these riffs in his ears, Shifty’s been making tokens of tribute to the later guitar slinger, from bespoke t-shirts to stuffed guitars.
Join us for Shiflett’s Randy Rhoads primer, learn why you should crank the outro to “S.A.T.O.” as loud as you can, and what Ozzy song makes this Foo cry.
Use code: PREMIERGUITAR10 for 10% off.
Offer valid until Dec 31, 2024. Visit http://bullheadamplification.com.
Always the drummer, Grohl thinks of the Foos’ approach to guitar parts as different limbs. Shiflett handles the 8th-note movement, Grohl pounds on the backbeats, and Smear simply crushes the downbeat. The result has shaped stadium rock for decades.
Back in February, the trio convened in Studio 607 for a sitdown that is destined to be an instant classic among Shred with Shiftydiehards. Below are a few excerpts from the conversation—edited for clarity—that hit on what first inspired Dave and Pat to pick up a guitar, why there was so much feedback at Germs gigs, and that one time they ran into Joe Bonamassa at Guitar Center. You can watch the full episode on YouTube, where they break down “Hey, Johnny Park!,” “La Dee Da,” “Rope,” and so much more. — Jason Shadrick
Chris Shiflett: Alrighty, fellas, let's jump into it. You're in the hot seat now.
Dave Grohl: Oh God. Here we go.
Shiflett: Let's start off easy. What are you playing today?
Grohl: This is my signature DG-335 Epiphone and it's fucking rad. Love it. Been playing it on tour.
Pat Smear: It's not even out.
Dave: Is it not out yet?
Smear: No. Only rumors.
Shiflett: For the sake of this interview, it might be out by the time this airs, so we could be in a time machine. Pat, how did you go from being a guy who famously borrowed guitars at Germs gigs, didn't own one of your own, to the man we see here today with a barn full of guitars?
Smear: That's why, because I didn't even have my own guitar, so I'm like, well, now I need two.
Shiflett: … hundred … thousand. [laughs]. What are you playing today?
Smear: I am playing prototype number one, made by Mike McGuire from the Gibson Custom Shop. It's a Mini Barney Kessel Triburst prototype from 2011. May 11th, 2011.
Shiflett: Do you also have a baritone back there?
Smear: I do. My Hagstrom baritones are on tour, so that's my SG baritone. It's a funny guitar. I'm told that it was originally going to be a Buckethead model, his new model, and he just disappeared. So, they put it out as a baritone.
Grohl: He flew the coop?
Shiflett: When you first came back to the Foos, why did you land on a baritone so much of the time? Had you played much baritone prior to that?
Smear: I played one a little bit. I played one on The Color and the Shape album. That sounded great, but I never played it live. But then, what am I going to do? There are already two guitar players. When we were doing Wasting Light, I'm like, “What am I going to fit in here? Well, nobody's playing baritone. I'll pull that out.”
Grohl: And that’s the story of the Foo Fighters. [laughs]
Shiflett: What made you guys want to be guitar players in the first place? Because probably a lot of people don't know that the guitar actually came before drums, right?
Grohl: Yeah. My father was a classically trained flautist, and my mother bought him a nylon-string, which I don't think he ever played, but it sat in the corner of the room like a piece of furniture, and by the time I got to it I was maybe like eight or nine years old and it maybe had two or three strings on it. I picked it up and played “Smoke on the Water” or something like that. I understood where to put my hands on the frets, and then I was like, “wow, this is cool.”
Shiflett: Did you ever take lessons?
Grohl: I took a few lessons when I first started playing, and I was disappointed because I wanted to learn how to play chords so I could play along to things. I could hear the songs and sort of figure them out, but I was stuck with just getting my little-kid stuff together. And then the teacher started to try to teach me classical. I remember he taught me this thing. [plays short classical piece].
Smear: It worked! It's still there.
Grohl: I was like, fuck that shit.
“I don't even know what a good guitar sound is, but I do know when I play an old Trini through the Tone Master, I really have control over what I'm doing.” — Dave Grohl
Shiflett: What about you, Pat? What made you want to be a guitar player?
Smear: It was my sister Ingrid, who is a couple of years older. She had a nylon-string acoustic guitar in the house. I had those forced piano lessons when I was a kid, and I would cry through the whole thing. I hated it so much, and then I picked up the guitar and I'm like, “Oh, well, that's my thing.” But it was really [Alice Cooper’s] Love it to Death. That picture on the back cover. I'm like, I want to do this. I want to play that.
Shiflett: It's funny how that still informs your guitar choices. Who would you consider your primary guitar influences?
Grohl: I really liked Ace Frehley. I mean, I had a Beatles chord book, and that's where I was learning to play chords and stuff, but I never saw footage of the Beatles playing when I was eight or nine. I just thought Ace was so fucking cool looking, and I loved the way he stood, and I loved his Les Paul, and I thought that I could be a guitarist and look like him without all the fucking heels and the makeup and shit.
Smear: I don't know that I had one. I had a bunch. I had all the usual ones, but I thought Mick Ronson was the coolest, but as far as the playing, it was the Alice Cooper guys.
It wasn’t until the band started recording Wasting Light, that Pat Smear dived into the baritone guitar. “What am I going to fit in here?” thought Smear. “Well, nobody's playing baritone. I'll pull that out.”
Shiflett: When did you figure out that you needed a certain kind of gear to make it sound like the record?
Dave: It's funny. My mother bought me a Silvertone, like an old one from Sears with an amp in the case and everything, and it was cool. But then I found out about a distortion pedal. I don't know how, but I think I was in a music store and I saw one, and I said to my mom, I was like, “oh my God, mom, can I get it?” It was 30 bucks. It was an MXR. And I was like, “This is going to make it sound so much better.” And she's like, “Oh, good.” And we buy it and bring it home. After I plugged it in, she was like, “I thought you said it was going to make it sound good!”
Shiflett: It's distorting the sound. [Laughs]
Dave: Yeah, it doesn't sound good.
Shiflett: I had a little solid-state practice amp, and I'd go home and I'd try to play whatever I learned in my lesson and it wouldn't grit up at all. And you'd just kind of be confused. Why doesn't this sound like the Ozzy record? It doesn’t sound right!
Smear: I know! I never knew anything about that part of it.
Grohl: Well, you didn't even have any fucking gear. [Laughs]
Smear: I didn't even have gear. I didn't have a guitar. I didn't have an amp.
Shiflett: What was the time that you showed up at a Germs show and had to borrow somebody else's gear?
Smear: Well, that happened all the time, but the worst one was we were playing with X and I broke my guitar in the first song, and so I'm like, “I need Billy Zoom's guitar!” And, dude, I found out he was hiding in some closet with his guitar saying, “Keep him away from my fucking guitar.” I'm all drunk. I think somebody just taped it back together and we were okay.
Grohl: Is this why there was always so much fucking feedback at Germs gigs? You had no pedals, you would just crank the amp?
Smear: Well, if there was a pedal, I would just step on it and leave it there. And my favorite when I hear old tapes is tuning full volume with the pedal on.
Shiflett: Well, let's talk a little bit about your live rigs that you've gotten nowadays and how that's kind of changed over the years.
Smear: Yeah, Dave, talk about your live rig. [Laughs]
Grohl: Okay, just a disclaimer. I don't know a fucking thing. At first I was playing a Marshall, it was like a JCM 900 or something like that. For the first [Foo Fighters] album, that's what I was playing.
Shiflett: Pedals? No pedals?
Grohl: I really think I only had a RAT pedal and a fucking tuner. I don't think I had any delays or phasers or anything yet. I think I just had a RAT. Then eventually the Mesa/Boogies came along and it was like Dual Rectifiers and 4x12s and that kind of stuff. And then eventually I found one of those [Fender] Tone Masters at Norman’s [Rare Guitars]. And he was like, “These are great, man. This is what Aerosmith used on all of their cool shit.” I've stuck with them ever since. And the thing is that, I mean, I don't even know what a good guitar sound is, but I do know when I play an old Trini through that, I really have control over what I'm doing. I don't have any volume pedals or anything like that. I've got four channels of clean to dirty.
Shiflett: You do have a pretty straightforward live set up. Not a ton of pedals, just phaser and delay and a couple of things.
Grohl: And I can roll [the volume knob] a lot. I mean, that's the thing with the Trini is that they're kind of reactive. They're dynamic and you can make them do …
Shiflett: It leaves a lot in your hands.
Grohl: It does. And especially when you're running around the stage and I don't have 20 seconds to get back to a pedalboard, then I could just roll up and down and just do it in the hands.
“But it was really [Alice Cooper’s] Love it to Death. That picture on the back cover. I'm like, I want to do this. I want to play that.” — Pat Smear
Shiflett: It's interesting. When I joined the band I was playing through a Dual Rectifier and I think you were playing through a Dual Rectifier live, but I was surprised to learn that for Nothing Left to Lose you had used the Trini and old vintage AC-30s and Memory Man, and Hiwatts, so your studio thing and your live thing were very different.
Grohl: I remember having that conversation with my guitar tech at the time, and the justification was basically, if one of those things goes down while we're on the road, we're kind of screwed. And so the Rectifiers were really consistent and you didn't have a lot of problems with them, and if you needed to find another one, they were easy to find.
Smear: And they'd send them like that. [snaps fingers]
Grohl: Yeah, they'd be really quick. And we were just doing that because we were blazing through gigs so much.
Shiflett: I don't remember which tour cycle it was, but there was just a point where when you got that Tone Master and I came in with a Friedman and a something else or an AC, I forget what it was, all of a sudden it went from that to this completely other tone thing live.
Smear: We all had the Mesas.
Grohl: I think we had gotten to the point where we all had sort of three different sounds and three different duties in the band, and so we all started to focus more on that.
Both Grohl and Shiflett are armed with their respective signature guitars. Grohl’s recently released Epiphone DG-335 has been long requested by fans, while Shiflett’s Tele Deluxe will soon get a refresh.
Shiflett: I never had any effect pedals until I joined the band. Can you believe that?
Grohl: Wow.
Shiflett: Never, never played with a delay pedal or a flanger or any of that stuff in my life. And when we first started doing those rehearsals and there were songs like “Aurora” and “Generator” and stuff that had some color, that was when I had to first learn how to do that.
Grohl: I think that a lot of what we do comes from the studio. When we go in to record songs, the basic idea is usually pretty simple and we'll pull that together and then we start to color it with different things, different sections of the song, different effects, different tones, and things like that. And also the arrangement or composition of the three of us doing what we do since we don't want to just do the same thing all the time. I think it took 15 or 20 years for us to figure out the recipe or combination of what we do.
Shiflett: I wanted to talk to you about, “Hey, Johnny Park!” I remember when I bought that record, putting that song on and the big drums came in and then the guitars kicked in, it's like a guitar solo and there wasn't a lot of that in your music, and there really wasn't a lot of that even in alternative rock at that time. I was listening to the recorded version last night and it sounds like maybe it's like a Big Muff or something in that part? Do you remember what guitars you were playing? What amps, pedals, all that sort of stuff?
Grohl: I'm sure on that I was playing through a combination of amps. I think one was old Marshall. I think another might've been a Hiwatt. I don't remember what we had in there.
Smear: The only amp I remember was when you used that smokey cigarette amp. I don't even remember what song it was. But you used that on something.
Shiflett: What was your main go-to guitar back then?
Grohl: I was using the Trini a lot.
Shiflett: Oh, you had it even back then?
Grohl: Yeah, I got the Trini before Foo Fighters. I got it at this place called Southworth Guitars in Bethesda, Maryland, and there was a row of 335s and they're all red. They all kind of looked the same. And then there was this one with this different headstock and it had these diamond f-holes. I knew nothing about it. I didn't know anything about Trini Lopez. And it turned out great. It's the same one that I've used on fucking everything.
Shiflett: How many Trinis do you have? Vintage old ones?
Grohl: Maybe like five or six of them.
Shiflett: I didn't know if you were the Joe Bonamassa of Trinis.
Grohl: No, I’m not the Joe Bonamassa of anything.
Shiflett: I bet Joe Bonamassa is probably the Joe Bonamassa of Trinis. [Laughs.] That reminds me. My favorite guitar shopping moment with Pat was when we were making the last album and we were sitting there and we ran over to the rock and roll Guitar Center, and we went into the vintage room and we're looking at guitars.
Smear: Was Bonamassa there taking apart a Strat?
Shiflett: Yes, but the part that always sticks in my head is there was a 1997 Les Paul and they called it “vintage.” I was like, what? Really? God, how fucking vintage are we? [Laughs.]
Grohl: I just think we’re “used.”