Fontaines DC at All Together Now 2025: Biggest Irish group since U2 hit ferocious highs at all-conquering homecoming gig
Main stage, Friday
★★★★★
Grian Chatten
, the
Fontaines DC
frontman, must feel he's come to
All Together Now
underdressed, as he seems to be the only person on Curraghmore Estate on Friday night not wearing a Bohemian FC jersey bearing his band's name.
He makes up for the fashion lapse by leading the band through an all-conquering homecoming gig at which the biggest Irish group since U2 hit ferocious new highs.
They open with the title track from
Romance
, their fourth album, a psychedelic onslaught that showcases the quintet's talent for guitar pop that is both feather-light and hard-hitting.
Fontaines have defied the convention of flogging one or two ideas to death. The album which they released 18 months ago, is a leap forward full of piercing pop moments that would have stunned anyone who caught the band sharing a bill with Shame and The Murder Capital in 2018.
READ MORE
They proceed with stately briskness through their hit parade. Beginning with an onslaught of guitar, Boys in the Better Land is The Dubliners if they'd got really into punk in 1977. Nabokov is Yeatsian art-rock with a hint of the surreal in its lyrics ('He's selling insurance, selling clouds in the sky) – Lou Reed's Velvet Underground meets David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
Banter isn't their thing. Chatten introduces I Love You by proclaiming 'F*** the far right,' as the video screens proclaim 'Free Palestine'.
The singer elsewhere compensates for his lack of loquaciousness by wearing a sort of cyberpunk sarong with shades of Shane MacGowan replacing Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. He is accompanied by a light show of intense pink and green that suggests a trip to a psychedelic sweetshop.
[
Fontaines DC's Grian Chatten: 'Romance took a lot out of us. It was like a bomb went off, and then that silence'
Opens in new window
]
Fontaines DC have been playing festivals through the summer. This show could easily have been just another ticket punched at the end of a busy year of touring. But as they finish with Starburster, a mash-up of trip-hop and nu-metal, they make it clear that they want to leave an impression.
At the end of day one of the biggest All Together Now to date, this is the supersized gig with pep in its step.
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Irish Times
41 minutes ago
- Irish Times
One Night in Dublin ... at the museum: A nocturnal walkabout at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
At 10pm on a Thursday night, a fox slips out from the shadows at the gates of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Historian Barry Kehoe follows close behind, regarding the fox with professional suspicion. A guide for the night, Kehoe leads the way up a path by now well trodden; he has just shy of 25 years at IMMA under his belt. Kehoe adjusts his head lamp and offers a small torch as the sky quickly darkens. 'The Drummer' by Barry Flanagan, 1941–2009 in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA in Kilmainham. Photo: Bryan O'Brien Royal Hospital Kilmainham at night, home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art IMMA. Photo: Bryan O'Brien He heads towards the courtyard as the fox disappears into a hedge. Presumably he has rounds to do. By day, IMMA is full of chatter and curated light. But by night, it's quieter and more theatrical. The building looms in a way it doesn't during daylight hours, suddenly more mausoleum than gallery. READ MORE 'We're walking with Dublin's dead,' Kehoe says, referencing the graveyard a stone's throw away on the site of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham on the west side of Dublin city. He speaks in hushed tones as if not to disturb them. Built between 1680 and 1684, the Royal Hospital was once home to hundreds of retired soldiers and was the capital's main burial grounds. In more recent history, a temporary mortuary was erected on the old hospital grounds in grim anticipation of a Covid-19 surge in 2020. Today it houses more than 4,500 contemporary artworks by Irish and international artists. Kehoe is not alone within these walls. Aside from the company of ghosts of Ireland past, somewhere in the east wing is artist-in-residence Eoghan Ryan. He lives onsite, in the old stables at the edge of the museum complex only a short walk from the main building. Ryan's immaculate studio shines like a beacon on the otherwise darkened campus. Inside, the walls are painted with brightly coloured trains and a desk in the corner is covered with the works of Thomas Kinsella . The collection is inherited, says Ryan; the poet was his grand-uncle. IMMA artist-in-residence Eoghan Ryan at work in the old stables. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Artist Eoghan Ryan at the door of his studio/residence at IMMA. Photo: Bryan O'Brien The multidisciplinary artist from Dublin moved back from Berlin and has lived on IMMA's grounds since January, one of a lucky few who have been granted a place on the museum's Dwell Here residency programme. While Ryan's stay lasts a year, others are here on a shorter contract. 'If people come for a month, they're really on a different buzz,' he says. 'The tempo shifts.' The blurring of domestic and professional quarters is not unfamiliar to Ryan. 'I don't know if it's the healthiest relationship,' he says, as he thinks aloud, 'to be so close to the institution that you're working in. But it's something I've been doing a lot in my life.' Much of his artwork – a blend of performance, puppetry and video installations – wades 'through the entanglements with institutions', meditating on systems of power. 'So living close, at that line between where something is made and something is shown, is kind of interesting.' A few days after we meet, Ryan's latest project – a collaborative dance performance piece – takes place on IMMA's grounds. 'It's a very specific mode that I really enjoy, being in a place and getting to know a place as a stage. You start to see things in a different way.' There are some uneasy contradictions, as well, that the artist grapples with. 'You're living in a completely surreal situation, especially when there's a large housing crisis in the city and you're living in a gated ex-military hospital,' says Ryan. 'It's very odd. It adds to the theatre of things. Everything starts to feel weirdly fictional when you come home from the pub and have to press the gate.' Barry Kehoe in the courtyard at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien The IMMA courtyard at night. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Security guard on night duty, Keely Raghavendra. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien But eventually, 'you do start to switch off from the strangeness of it all'. 'There is something comforting about knowing if you get really scared at night, you can go over to the security guards with a blanket. It's nice to know they're there,' he says. One of the security guards on night duty, Keely Raghavendra, takes a brief pause from patrol to say hello. 'Sometimes I scare myself,' Raghavendra says. When it gets into the wee hours of the morning, the shadows can start to play tricks on even the most grounded guard. 'I saw something in a basement. When I opened the door someone was looking at me. I was scared for a second, then I closed it and relaxed. Then I opened it again and it was gone,' he recalls. [ Lunch with a side of art: Seven Irish galleries with great cafes Opens in new window ] After a sound sleep knowing security have his back, Ryan's days to tend start early, usually at about 6.30am. Looking out the bedroom window in the morning, he often finds a spectacle. 'You wake up and there's always something weird. I woke up last Wednesday and there were just a load of soldiers rehearsing for the commemoration‚' he says, referring to last month's National Day of Commemoration Ceremony . 'I opened the blinds and was like: 'Oh great, this is happening today.'' With the exception of the museum's resident seagulls who continue to swoop and squawk even at night, the museum's courtyard feels otherworldly – strangely detached from its city setting. IMMA's permanent collection at night is a sight to behold. Much of the artwork takes on a new energy. 'When the lights are fully on, the red is a lot more dominant,' says Kehoe, considering Vik Muniz's Portrait of Alice Liddell, after Lewis Carroll. 'Seeing it now gives a completely different sense and feel to it.' Barry Kehoe with Mnemosyne, 2002, by Alice Maher in the IMMA gallery space. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien A wall plaque in the baroque chapel, Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Bluer hues are more present in dimmer lighting, giving the portrait's young subject a melancholy look. Barry Kehoe pictured in the Great Hall. Photo: Bryan O'Brien Machines whirr and hum, keeping control of the galleries' humidity levels and providing ambient background noise for a steady stream of consciousness as we take in the art. An audio loop of bird song from a distant installation filters through. Kehoe steps inside IMMA's baroque chapel, which was consecrated in 1686. It is pitch black. Stained glass windows gifted to the Royal Hospital by Queen Victoria in 1849 cast an eerie reflection on to the chapel wall. 'You can sort of feel the weight of history in this part of the building that you don't quite feel in the rest of it, because it still has that very ceremonial element to it,' Kehoe says, shining a torch over the decorative windows. 'They used to lock the pensioners out of the chapel because if they came in here during the daytime they'd fall asleep.' [ Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields review – At Imma, an outstanding experimentalist's work takes over three floors Opens in new window ] From there, Kehoe walks on to the Master's Quarters, the palatial dwelling place of the hospital's masters and their families. Passing from the old diningroom through deserted corridors, Kehoe comes to stand in the Oak Room. He says it contains the strongest poltergeist presence. 'There's a lot of potential about these rooms in terms of great events. It's believed that some of the leaders of the 1916 Rising may have been questioned here before their executions,' he says. A light drizzle starts to fall as Kehoe enters the Master's Garden, an expansive green space dotted with fruit trees and cherub statues. The isolated cherubs once formed part of the triangular plinth of the Victoria Statue removed to the Royal Hospital from Leinster House, home to Dáil Éireann, in 1948. 'It's a strange sound oasis. The walls and the trees kind of cut out the city's sound,' says Kehoe. Apartment blocks and cranes join Phoenix Park's Wellington monument on the city's night-time skyline above the treetops. Barry Kehoe the military cemetery in the grounds of Royal Hospital Kilmainham. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien 'Weirdly, the city is growing up around us. When I started working here you wouldn't have had any of that in the skyline so you wouldn't have seen anything over the wall of the garden,' says Kehoe. A swarm of bats descend at the headstone of Master Lord Frederick Roberts' beloved warhorse, Volonel. Erected in the garden in 1899 with great ceremony, the headstone's original location meant it could be seen from the windows of the Master's Quarters. Lord Wolseley, who preceded Roberts, also buried his treasured dog Caesar in the garden, under a mulberry bush. Moving from one miniature cemetery to a far greater one, Kehoe's tour arrives inside the gates of Bully's Acre where more than 200,000 estimated burials were made. As the main public burial ground for Dublin city before Glasnevin Cemetery, dating from the early 1600s until 1833, there are a few big names in the soil beneath. The remains of Brian Boru 's son and grandson are thought to have been buried here after the Battle of Clontarf. Bully's Acre was subject to much body snatching over the years. In more recent history, Robert Emmet was laid to rest here following his 1803 execution up the road from here on Thomas Street. However, his body was later secretly dug up and taken elsewhere; its final resting place a mystery . At the far end of the grounds, the Royal Hospital's recently restored military cemetery lies unlit and exposed to the open road. An ambulance blares past as the museum sleeps behind the walls. The night outside holds many more stories beyond the Royal Hospital. Next in the 'One Night in Dublin' series - a night out with Dublin's street cleaners - on Wednesday
Irish Times
an hour ago
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Jerry Fish: ‘I'm a London-born Dub but I discovered most of my DNA is from exactly where I now live'
How agreeable are you? It depends on what you want from me. I'm friendly, easy going, reasonable, but I've never been a pushover. What's your middle name and what do you think of it? My middle name is Joseph, and it was my grandmother's name, Josie, and my grandfather's as well as my father's and my brother's first name. It's a family name. I think it's strong and friendly. Where is your favourite place in Ireland? I just love Ireland as a country, especially when the sun is shining. I tell people that I live where the last wolf in Ireland was killed, on Mount Leinster, where we've been for 20 years. It's quite strange because I did the DNA thing, and I discovered that most of my DNA is from exactly where I live. I'm obviously here for a reason. That said, I'm a Dub, and my family and ancestors are all inhabitants of Raytown [better known as Ringsend], the mouth of the river Liffey in Dublin, so my heart is at Poolbeg lighthouse in Dublin Bay. Describe yourself in three words. An emotional fish. READ MORE When did you last get angry? I was very angry when I was the singer in An Emotional Fish in the 1990s. I was disappointed to find that as a working-class person I was isolated in the music industry, and that most of the industry comprised middle-class people whom I didn't really understand at the time. I wanted to be Iggy Pop. I still look to Iggy as a role model, but he is cool, not angry. Luckily, I've veered more towards the former than the latter. What have you lost that you would like to have back? I've never had an inkling to look back, but I've lost a lot of dear friends – I lost my best friend when he was 20. I've realised recently that not only have I spent a lot of my life dealing with grief, but also with the realisation that grief comes with a gift, which is the knowledge that we're all visitors to this world, that we're just passing through. What's your strongest childhood memory? I grew up in south London, an Irish immigrant. We were the melting-pot generation, so my parents were greeted by the infamous 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish' signs. Yeah, welcome to London. It was a diverse, tough childhood; most of my peers were from the Caribbean or were cockneys. The older I get, however, the more I reflect on my childhood in London. I'm grateful for it because I think the 1960s and 70s, in particular, were when Britain changed. It became a new Britain, if you like, a new people, and I'm still quite proud to have been part of that London community. [ 'No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs': Irish Times readers recall seeing notorious signs in Britain Opens in new window ] Where do you come in your family's birth order, and has this defined you ? I'm the eldest of six. I left home at 17, returned to the UK and started travelling. The eldest has responsibilities; I had to help out a lot, and that certainly taught me things, but I also had the fortune of being able to leave first, to escape chaos. What do you expect to happen when you die? No idea, but you are what you bring to the party, not what you take from it. If you spend your life being kind and generous, you leave that behind, and that rolls forward. If you're mean, you put that on the Earth. When were you happiest? I spent much of my misspent youth playing in garage rock bands and living as a beach bum in the Mediterranean, but I became happiest of all when I became a father. Even though I had a tremendously liberating youth that I can recall great moments, from being in An Emotional Fish, touring the world, even before that, sleeping on beaches and not having any worries or cares. Fatherhood filled a gap, something I realised I was missing. Which actor would play you in a biopic about your life? I recently watched the Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man, where he was portrayed by a chimpanzee. In my biopic, which would be directed by the late David Lynch or Wes Anderson, I could be played by a fish. Which fish? I think carp have great faces. [ Better Man review: Robbie Williams as a monkey is a surprising look at the ego-driven's star's life Opens in new window ] What's your biggest career/personal regret? I think everything happens for a reason, and we learn from our mistakes and failures. I've been through many ups and downs, but they all led to a better place in some way. I'm very happy in the here and now, and for me, that's where it works. Have you any psychological quirks? I'm an artist who ran away with the circus, so I am a psychological quirk. It's a whole mess, a circus, and I am its monkey. In conversation with Tony Clayton-Lea Jerry Fish brings his Electric Sideshow and Fish Town to Electric Picnic, August 29th-31st,
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Bob Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy as Boomtown Rats play All Together Now 2025
The Boomtown Rats Something Kind of Wonderful stage, Sunday ★★★★☆ It has been a year of anniversaries for Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats. Half a century has elapsed since Geldof and bandmates emerged, spluttering and snarling, from the Dublin punk scene. But 2025 is also the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, the moment Geldof the frontman with the crazy hair was replaced in the public imagination by sweary St Bob of telethon immortality. Both sides of the singer are on show during The Boomtown Rats' agreeably splenetic Sunday-afternoon set at All Together Now . The hits arrive at a steady clip, starting with Rat Trap, a neurotic slide tackle of a tune informed by Geldof's experience working in a Dublin slaughterhouse during the dead-end 1970s. [ Bob Geldof: 'I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say' Opens in new window ] Looking professorially grey at the age of 73, Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy. His voice isn't what it was, and there are stretches when he rasps rather than sings – while his body language is that of a stick insect with a few things to get off its chest. The songs – including the beautifully bittersweet Someone's Looking at You, from 1979 – are evergreen, however, even if the rockabilly epic (She's Gonna) Do You In is stretched to snapping point. 'This is the Pink Floyd bit – it goes on for f**king ages,' Geldof explains. All Together Now 2025: Bob Geldof, Doc O'Connor and Pete Briquette of The Boomtown Rats onstage on Sunday. Photograph: Kieran Frost/Redferns The singer recently spoke out against Israel's action in Gaza . He repeats the message at All Together Now, pausing during I Don't Like Mondays' 'the lesson today is how to die' beat to talk about the women and children dying in Palestine and about those giving their lives on the frontline in Ukraine . As he talks the video screens show the Palestine flag. Fifty years in, Geldof is still an expert at big gestures and at combining pop and protest to theatrical effect. These rats have some scurrying left in them yet.
