14 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Culture
In one week in July, the Irish rock band
Fontaines D.C. went from the Glaston-
bury Festival to Copenhagen to Bar-
celona to St. Petersburg to Moscow. At
the airport on the way back from that
last stop, the frontman, Grian Chatten,
wandered off to buy some headphones
while the rest of the band got on the
plane.
Chatten had to kill the better part of
the next 24 hours, waiting for the next
flight. He passed the time, he said, by
“drinking bad Guinness until it tasted
like good Guinness.” In the air, he kept
going with plenty of free wine. Eventu-
ally, Chatten made it back to Dublin and
to his parents’ house — or “gaff,” as he
calls it — where he lives between tour-
ing.
Later that day, in an interview with
his bandmates at a pub near the studio
where they rehearse, Chatten had a
rolled cigarette in his hand and a Flann
O’Brien novel in his overcoat pocket. He
recalled that he was still drunk when his
dad came to collect him at Dublin Air-
port. But the old man wasn’t upset at the
boozy state of his son, Chatten said: “He
joined in when we got home!”
The vagaries of rock band road life
may not pair naturally with filial domes-
ticity, but that’s just where Fontaines
D.C. is at right now.
A tour for the band’s debut album,
“Dogrel,” released in April, has taken
Fontaines D.C. all over Europe and the
United States. The summer has been a
blur of major festival dates, plus a
punchy performance on “The Tonight
Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and a
nomination for the Mercury Prize, a ma-
jor British music award.
Fontaines D.C. is an anarchic guitar
rock band in a bleep-bloop present. And
unexpectedly, it’s become one of the big-
gest Irish breakout acts in years.
The emphasis is on Irish. The band
refers to Ireland’s famed literary tradi-
tion — from the works of giants like
James Joyce and William Butler Yeats
to lesser-known figures like the poet and
novelist Patrick Kavanagh — as inspira-
tion. They don’t seem afraid of how un-
hip that might sound in 2019.
The formula on “Dogrel” is simulta-
neously timeworn and specific: over
guitars and drums, Chatten delivers ob-
lique, compact poems about Dublin.
“You know I love that violence that you
get around here, that kind of ready-
steady violence,” Chatten singsong
shouts on the track “Liberty Belle”: It
could be a hand sweep toward Ireland’s
bloody history, or a nod toward a rough
night out in the city.
The band’s five members, all in their
early 20s, met as songwriting students
at the British and Irish Modern Music
Institute in Dublin, and bonded over
their shared love of those lions of Irish
words. The band grew, naturally, out of
their friendship and shared interests.
For a few years starting in 2016, they
ambled about playing local gigs and
shuffling through sartorial phases, they
said. In one, no matter the weather, they
wore Echo and the Bunnymen-inspired
long coats; in another, it was all women’s
crop tops.They spent as much time rehearsing
as they did writing verse, the bassist
Conor Deegan recalled. They’d go to
pubs and pass a shared notebook
around the table; they self-published
chapbooks and slipped them into book-
stores. They put on readings with other
writers, including a soap-salesman-poet
they met in Sweny’s, the drugstore thatfeatures in Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
“We pounded each other down to our
bare emotions,” Chatten said, remem-
bering those times. “And that’s why
we’re friends for life. And enemies for
life.”
That kind of open intensity and proud
sensitivity might explain why a tradi-
tional white-dude rock band has hit anerve, when the world seems to need
anything but more white-dude rock.
“I certainly don’t think that there’s
any element of machismo” to Fontaines
D.C., Chatten said.
“We’d just sit and read books and
drink pints and think fancifully,” Deegan
added.
Mesmerizing early seven-inch sin-
gles like “Chequeless Reckless” and
“Hurricane Laughter” caught the atten-
tion of the American indie label Partisan
Records, which signed Fontaines D.C. in
November 2018. Then “Dogrel” was re-
leased, and the band’s lives were up-
ended. They were living on rice and Ta-
basco not that long ago, Deegan said;
nowadays, he added, the label has
worked them to the bone with festival
dates.
The band’s last chance for a vacation,
a few precious days in Mexico City, was
stolen by the offer to play “The Tonight
Show” in New York. Their next chance
for a break, Conor Curley, a guitarist,
mumbled, could be taken away “by a
[expletive] gig on the moon or some-
thing.”
But the hard work was worth it, Chat-
ten said: Fontaines D.C. wants to give
the world a view of Ireland that neither
accepts antiquated clichés nor rejects
the past.
Even so, the band’s love of Joyce and
Yeats is unusual; young punk-adjacentbands aren’t supposed to love dusty
books you get assigned in high school. A
fellow Dubliner, Sally Rooney — per-
haps the most famous young novelist in
the world right now — has taken shots at
her literary forebears. “I hate Yeats!’
she told the Irish Independent newspa-
per in 2017. “How has he become this
sort of emblem of literary Irishness
when he was this horrible man?”But Chatten said Ireland was “sitting
on a gold mine of history.”
“For us to pretend it doesn’t exist is
for us to become a whitewashed, face-
less country, which means we are essen-
tially robots with particular accents,” he
added.
His deep interest in Ireland’s history
and culture goes back to coming from
somewhere else, the singer said. He was
born in Barrow-in-Furness, England,
though he was raised in Ireland from the
age of 9 weeks. “I was insecure about
my Irishness,” Chatten said. “I wanted
to achieve an understanding and a veri-
fication.”
Another band Chatten likes that fix-ates on Irish things is Girl Band, he said,
a Dublin trio whose song “Um Bongo”
revolves around a mundane local street
snack. “For Girl Band to scream the
words ‘chicken fillet roll’ over and over
again — it’s so poignant,” he said. “Not
all romance has to belong to the past.
And if we can accept that as a society, I
think we might be happier. Or at least
more romantic.”
Eventually, the band had to leave the
pub. They were meeting with their
record label, the drummer Tom Coll
said: There was “anxiety-inducing”
2020 business planning to attend to. Be-
fore they got up, Chatten took a last gulp
of his Guinness, then reached through a
forest of empty pint glasses for a takeout
menu from a Moscow cafe that was lying
on the table. He’d scribbled down some
scraps of verse on it during the tour. “I
don’t know if you want that,” he said,
handing it over.
On the back were scrawled fragments
about a “salvaged life to live again” and
“heaven through the fog,” “Irish mind”
and “Irish eye.” It was a romantic thing
to do, to hand over a note covered with
half-baked poetry — and perfectly on
brand for a band so unafraid of seeming
naïve.
“Later Sam,” Chatten said to the bar-
tender as he strolled out.
“Yeah,” the bartender answered. “See
you on the TV shows.”Channeling punk, and James Joyce
DUBLINA breakout Irish band
lays an emphasis on
its cultural heritageBY AMOS BARSHADPAULO NUNES DOS SANTOS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom left, the members of Fontaines D.C.: Carlos O’Connell, Conor Curley, Conor Dee-
gan, Grian Chatten and Tom Coll. Below, the band performing on “The Tonight Show
Starring Jimmy Fallon” on May 1.ANDREW LIPOVSKY/NBCOne lyric could be a hand sweep
toward Ireland’s bloody history,
or a nod toward a rough night
out in Dublin.The great man, at his great desk, with
photos of his great successes spackling
the walls until there was no wall left
showing, bore down on me.
“Is theater your whole life?”
Was it a trick question? This was, af-
ter all, Hal Prince.
In 1982, when he somehow found time
to interview me for a lowly apprentice
job, he had a stage résumé going back to
1950, with more than 40 credits on it. He
was already known as the “Dark
Prince”: the man who stripped the last
veneer of inanity from musical theater
and brought it into line with the all-en-
compassing and all-despairing outlook
of contemporary drama.
“No!” I said.
That was the right answer, even if it
was partly a lie. I’d spent a lot of my life,
in fact, listening to cast albums of shows
he’d produced (“West Side Story,” “Fid-
dler on the Roof”) or produced and di-
rected (“Cabaret,” “Company,” “Follies,”
“A Little Night Music”) or just directed
(“Sweeney Todd”). Those shows had
made me want to model my career on
his, which is why, at 23, a grad school
dropout, I was sitting before him.
But I also believed, largely from ob-serving his career, that the theater was
better when it talked about real things.
His shows were about Nazism and dec-
adence, marriage and nostalgia, injus-
tice and upheaval. His work all but
erased the light-touch, keep-it-moving,
bring-on-the-girls aesthetic of his own
mentor, George Abbott, for whom he
produced his first hit, “The Pajama
Game,” in 1954.
“You can’t be interesting within the
theater,” I said, “if you have no interest
in anything outside it.”
Perhaps on pure pretentiousness, I
got the job.
Let’s put “job” in quotation marks. Be-
ing Hal Prince’s apprentice was a huge
honor, almost (in my family) like getting
into law school, but there were different
degrees of apprenticeship.
But I did not, like some lucky gofers,
get to watch him put one of his classic
shows together. By the time I showed up
at his New York office, the collaboration
with Stephen Sondheim that had
produced an astonishing string of
groundbreakers from 1970 to 1981 was
sundered, and he was about to embark
on what would be a string of flops.
I knew on the first day of rehearsal
that “A Doll’s Life” would bomb. A fanta-
sia on what might have happened to
Nora from Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” after
she slammed the door on her family, it
featured beautiful music by Larry
Grossman, but a book and lyrics, by
Betty Comden and Adolph Green, that
were awkward, tone-deaf and over-
reaching. Meant as a comment on the
unfulfilled promise of feminism, the
story just seemed silly, with its porten-tous murk and operetta high jinks.
You can probably learn more from a
total failure than you can from a total hit.
I watched in amazement as Mr. Prince
swiftly put the show on its feet, and then
ordered overnight rewrites. He was effi-
cient and basically unflappable, with the
confidence of a workman who had
forced many unlikely contraptions to
stand.
Still, I was surprised to notice, smug
as I was, how heavily he leaned on his
pet staging ideas, those moving scaf-
folds and catwalks that made even late
19th-century Norway look like an erec-
tor set. And wasn’t his taste for pat sym-bolism a bit gauche? Dancers repre-
senting love and death wandered
through the action like Munch charac-
ters escaped from a museum.
What took longer to realize was how
those tropes of the “concept” musical,
which Mr. Prince pioneered and which
other directors have run with ever since,
were countered by the immense practi-
cal knowledge acquired over a life in the
theater. In his bones, he understood the
different effects that could be produced
by placing an actor in one position or in
another, two feet away. By moving a
song to a moment in the action five min-
utes later. By replacing that song withone whose temperature was 10 degrees
colder.
Gradually, with these kinds of adjust-
ments and more, the show got better.
Not enough better to keep everyone
happy, as I learned when I inadvertently
became involved in an intrigue.
One morning, Mr. Prince casually an-
nounced that he wanted to see the ap-
prentices — there were two that day —
during the first rehearsal break. When
we met, he said, more or less, “I’m going
to cover my eyes now so that you won’t
know which of you I’m talking about.”
The other apprentice and I gulped as
one.
“It has come to my attention that one
of you has been having conversations
with someone on the creative team
about problems with the show. I can un-
derstand your having problems with the
show. So do I. Yes, some of the lyrics are
bad. Have you ever wondered why I
place the chorus facing upstage” —
away from the audience — “when they
have to sing the worst of them?”
It had not occurred to me, yet now
that I thought of it, I realized he’d made a
lot of improvements by hiding things.
“But the main thing I want to say is
that these are conversations you should
avoid. Whether the show is good or bad,
they make the process bad. And no one
produces their best work that way.”
He opened his eyes. As he often did,
he was wearing his glasses on the top of
his big shiny dome, as if his thoughts
rather than his eyes wanted focusing.
I pointed out that since my fellow ap-
prentice knew he wasn’t the one en-
gaged in the inappropriate discussions,it was clearly me — and that I’d only be-
come engaged in them when directly
asked.
Mr. Prince laughed. “Next time say:
‘Take it up with the director.’”
It was an extraordinarily gentle visit
to the woodshed, and I learned my les-
son. I also learned that a Hal Prince
show was a Hal Prince show. Part of his
success as a director was that he so of-
ten had the clout of the producer. He
used this strength, I came to believe, not
just to hone winners but also to cut
losses. He made the best he could of “A
Doll’s Life” and then, after it began its
tryout in Los Angeles that summer, left
for his inviolable vacation in Europe. He
can’t have been surprised when, upon
arrival in New York in September, it in-
stantly died.
But flop or hit, he would gather his
team on the morning after opening
night, as he had for decades, to plan his
next show. Without that sense of the
business as an ongoing concern, always
a work in progress, he could never have
become an artist. It gave him the prac-
tice anyone needs, and it took the pres-
sure off any one production. A good
thing, I learned watching him, because
successes are as mysterious as failures.
Three disasters after “A Doll’s Life,”
through a process not so very different,
came “The Phantom of the Opera.”
That no one can have that kind of ca-
reer anymore is the theater’s loss. Hal
Prince’s astonishing achievement dem-
onstrates the power of the long view. To
bring things to light, you have to keep
working further into the dark. Maybe
that’s what those glasses were for?My summer with Hal
Harold Prince at a 2006 performance of “The Phantom of the Opera” in New York.SETH WENIG/REUTERSREMEMBRANCEHow a lowly apprentice
viewed the legendary
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