#dogrel

Carlos O'Connell and Conor Curley from Fontaines D.C. dedicated an one of their 8 hour-long episodes as BBC 6 Music's Artist In Residence taking listeners back to the Garage Bar in Dublin, a now-shut down bar that ran music nights where the university-aged Fontaines had a major musical education in garage rock.

First broadcast in April 2022, I think this episode shows you some of the major influences on Fontaines' early rock n roll sound, the almost 70s-inspired, energetic guitar rock that you hear on a lot of songs that made it onto the first album, Dogrel. Tracks like ‘Boys In The Better Land’, ‘Liberty Belle’, ‘Too Real’ or even ‘Big’. (It was a sound they said they had mostly abandoned by the time all the songs on Dogrel were complete, and they had moved to more of the darker post punk sound you hear on the rest of the album*.)

Further, I see some of the lyrical influences Grian Chatten has absorbed from the classic songwriting of the greats: I have talked before about Grian's blurring together of the words “dream” and “drink” on songs like ‘Skinty Fia’ (‘there's not a thing that can't be fixed with a dream’) and later ‘Death Kink’ (‘amazing stars from the dream/drink’), and a direct precursor to that is the Electric Prunes song that Fontaines started this show with, ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’, which they picked up during the Garage Bar days. Formative musical years, and so an episode that I quite enjoyed listening to.

The tracklist for this episode is available on the 6 Music archive page below, and all episode tracklists are in the archived guide here. If you make a playlist of the songs or whatever, feel free to add it on to this post in a reblog too, that'd be awesome.

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For folks that were asking for the Artist In Residence shows. I have all the ones that were broadcast in 2022, so unless there are episodes in the BBC vaults that never made it onto the airwaves, I have them all and will slowly be clipping up and posting them. BBC Sounds is no longer available outside the UK, though it very much was and was heavily pushed all across BBC networks in 2022, and I kept the episodes, just because they were so good. So you'll be able to access the guide and tracklisting pages linked above everywhere, but if you clicked on the available episodes from abroad unfortunately it will redirect to BBC.com and leave you devastated. So. Here we are.

Let me know if you liked this style of editing! Leaving the songs in would make the clips longer, needing multi-part posting and would open me up to possible copyright takedowns (rarer with audio but not impossible), but let me know what you thought.

*Iirc this was said on an old episode of Tape Notes and I'll have to trawl back to find, clip and post it, so hopefully that's on the card for someday.