“We had the track-listing for the album done when he brought it in, which kind of fucked things up but it works really well as the final track – especially as the last two albums ended in ballads. “He’d been cooking up this really heavy instrumental guitar track with different sorts of percussion and stuff like that,” his bandmate explains. There are a lot of things on this album that are quite challenging for us to perform, which is okay when you’re in the studio and can have another go at it, but is going to be terrifying when we start playing live again!”Īnother of Skinty Fia’s curveball standouts, ‘Nabokov’, is inspired by Conor Curley’s reading of Lolita. “We’ve been rehearsing ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ live and, well, it’s like trying to balance on a wire! If anyone slips out of synch vocally, the whole song sounds fucking awful. “We’ll probably save that one for the Late Late Show,” Grian deadpans. Has he considered the balls Jools Holland is going to make of introducing ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ on Later With… ? The whole thing of them not being allowed to put an Irish phrase on their mother’s headstone is endemic of the way Irish people are spoken to in England.” “I was influenced writing and recording it by Lankum and Sinéad O’Connor who have that divinity themselves. “It’s such a massive topic to tackle that I felt there had to be almost a divinity to it, which the choral thing seemed to suit,” Grian resumes. courting the Coldplay market should be cast aside now. And they got back to us saying they loved it and had played it at her grave, which was the most meaningful validation we could have got.”įrom choral wall of sound start to Lydon-esque caterwauling finish, ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ is epic without ever straying into bloated stadium rawk territory. If it is, here’s some information about Margaret and a picture of her grave.’ They asked us to send them a link to the song, which we did without a note because I really didn’t know what to write. “After the Skinty Fia track-listing was announced, the family reached out and said, ‘It looks like this is about our mother. “Her name is Margaret Keane and she lived in Coventry where first the church and then a judge told her kids, ‘No, you can’t have that as her epitaph’ because it was in Irish,” Grian Chatten sombrely explains when we track him down to his London lair. The most sonically thrilling opening to an Irish long-player since U2 kicked Achtung Baby off with ‘Zoo Station’, ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo’ translates as ‘In our hearts forever’, and is the inscription that grieving children wanted to put on their Irish mother’s headstone in England, but weren’t allowed to because the powers that be there thought it was a Tiocfaidh ár lá-style political declaration. Imagine really early Kraftwerk jamming with Enya, the Monks of Glenstal Abbey, Velvet Underground and folk legends Fairport Convention, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect when you hit ‘play’ or put the needle down on Fontaines D.C.’s soon-to-be-unleashed Skinty Fia album.
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