Grian Chatten Photo: Polocho
Grian Chatten is mostly known as the lead singer of Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C.
The band gained massive acclaim for their first album Dogrel, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize and named as the album of the year by BBC Radio 6.
Their success continued with their second album, A Hero's Death, which received a nomination for best rock album at the 2021 Grammy Awards.
Now Chatten has released his first solo album, Chaos for the Fly.
He spoke to Charlotte Ryan about writing the album, and his constant need to create.
"My reaction, immediately, every single time I've ever been involved in an album and it's come out is to just run to the next thing," Chatten says.
"I feel more comfortable when I have music that no one's heard yet, that I'm planning to release. So we're just going to go straight into writing again as soon as this week is done."
While Fontaines D.C. have certainly enjoyed a great deal of success, Chatten says he started writing Chaos for the Fly while spending time in Dublin.
"I did it as a solo project just because maybe there was a certain level of autonomy that was attractive, but other than that I knew it wasn't a Fontaines record," he says.
One of the album's standout tracks is a throwback to Chatten's youth.
"There's a song on the album called 'Bob's Casino' that kind of arrived to me when I was looking at the sea in Dublin one day," he says.
"It kind of arrived relatively fully formed, with the strings and the brass and all that kind of stuff.
"I don't want to compromise it, I don't want to put it through any filters. I just want to do exactly what's in my head, and that's the way I did it."
'Bob's Casino' is in fact a real place, located in the coastal town of Skerries, where Chatten spent some of his childhood.
"I moved a lot as a kid, but I was always around this town called Skerries In North County Dublin. It was always a really nice seaside town and there's a casino that's on the waterfront.
"We used to go in there and play pool when we were kids and buy sweets there and stay there for a couple of hours."
Chatten admits he is the type of person to see the darkness in things, which shows through in his songwriting.
"I've always kind of been one for subversion I suppose, I like the slight of hand thing, I like something being shown to you… kind of like looking around and seeing there are mechanisms around the apparently happy thing you're seeing that may be dark."
As a songwriter, Chatten says he also writes poetry. While it doesn't make it into his music generally, he says it's a way of staying earthed.
"I write a lot of poetry just for myself really and I'm aware that it has a function that it keeps that aspect of my brain quite fit".
However, he says he wouldn't describe himself as a poet - particularly not in Ireland.
"I'm Irish, it's difficult to yourself a poet in Ireland without people telling you that you've got notions. That's what we call it in Ireland you know - he's got notions now," he says. "He's new to London, he's got notions."
To "have notions", Chatten says, is to have a bit of a fantastical, self-imported view of yourself.
"You'd let other people call [you] a poet, you wouldn't dare call yourself a poet," he says. "It's kinda like, you wouldn't necessarily call yourself a saint."
While the singer has struggled with insomnia in the past, he says being off tour and living in Camden has reset his sleep patterns. And after an incredibly busy few years, with further tours ahead, Chatten says it's something he'd like to work on further.
"What I'd like to do is get to a point where I'm deeply content in my own company, and I think I've lost that.
"Over the last couple of years of touring, I think if I could get into that place I'd have enough of a kind of integrity, enough of a foundation within myself to last the tour without breaking, hopefully."
