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Search for a Fontaines D.C. video and you get the video. Search for who made it and you get a wall of January 2020 news posts that all say the same forty words, because they were all working from the same press release.
The credits exist. They are just scattered across YouTube descriptions, one Wikipedia footnote, an IMDb page and a Vimeo upload, and nobody has ever put them in one place.
So here is that place. We have a bias to declare before we start: we made one of them.
The Hugh Mulhern years
Mulhern was the band’s regular director before anybody outside Dublin knew who they were. He shot “Too Real” in 2018, the video that got them noticed when they signed to Partisan, and the reference points were The Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and Gilla Band rather than anything from the post-punk revival they kept getting filed under.
Two years later he was still the one they called. “A Hero’s Death” is his, produced by Aaron McEnaney and Theresa Adebiyi, and it is the closest thing the band has to a proper short film. Aidan Gillen plays a late night host called Georgie Barnes whose co-presenter is a puppet, worked by Bryan Quinn. The band come on to play. Georgie watches them warm to the puppet more than they warm to him. It falls apart from there.
That video is worth studying if you are a producer in this country, because it is a genuinely ambitious idea executed on what was clearly not a Pulse Films budget. One set. One name actor. A puppet. It plays bigger than it cost, which is the whole trick.
The one-offs
“Roy’s Tune” went to Liam Papadachi in 2019. Conor Curley co-wrote the song about walking home late from a job in a burrito shop, and the video stays in that register.
“Big” is Molly Keane’s, and she shot it herself, on Moore Street in Dublin 1, with Finn McGinnis in front of the camera and Dara McKeagney on post. Moore Street is a specific choice. It is the street the fruit and veg sellers have held onto while every block around it has been sold, redeveloped or boarded up, and putting the opening track of Dogrel there says something the lyrics do not have to.
There is also an older “Liberty Belle” from 2017, cut by Javier Martinez de Velasco around the Darklands Audio recording, back when the band were still self-releasing.
Liberty Belle, 2020
This one is ours. Greg M Purcell and Mark William Logan directed it. Greg, Mark, Kenneth Adams, Cormac Dunne, Georgia Kelly and Daire Hall all shot on it, which tells you what kind of production it was: six people with cameras, following a band through a year that got away from everybody.
The footage covers the whole of 2019, ending with the sold out Vicar Street homecoming. Crowds on 35mm. Backstage, buses, soundchecks, the Forum in London, the bits in between that you only get if you are already in the room and nobody is performing for you.
Chatten described the song as “a lament to the death of old Dublin”, written, he added, by people who could not afford the new one. Cutting a tour retrospective to that lyric is a slightly uncomfortable thing to do and we knew it at the time. The song mourns a city being priced out; the footage shows five lads from that city selling out venues abroad. We left the tension in rather than smoothing it over. A few reviewers noticed that if you play the 2017 version and the 2020 version back to back they work as a before and after. That was not planned, but we will take it.
You can see the rest of our music work at Collective Films.
Skerries, because of Covid
“I Don’t Belong” was directed by Conor Deegan III, the band’s bassist, and it was never meant to be shot in Ireland at all. There was a London shoot planned. Lockdown killed it in March 2020, so they went to Skerries in north County Dublin instead, where Chatten grew up, and filmed him walking past the town and then into the sea.
It is the cheapest video in the catalogue and one of the best, which is not a coincidence. Constraint did the directing.
Romance, and the budget arriving
By 2024 the band were on XL and the videos changed accordingly. “Starburster” went to Aube Perrie, with Christopher Ripley shooting, Gwen Ghelid cutting and Pulse Films producing. Jade Thirlwall appears in it. The shoot did not happen anywhere near Dublin either. Perrie took the crew to Maryport, a town on the Cumbrian coast, and used residents’ houses and the chip shop on Grasslot as locations. Fans in the town spotted the band weeks before anyone knew why they were there.
“Bug” came at the end of that year and is the strange one. Andrea Arnold made it, her first music video ever, and she did it by recutting footage from her film Bird rather than shooting anything new. Carlos O’Connell has a cameo in the film. Barry Keoghan plays the character the song shares a name with. Arnold has said she turns down most video offers because she does not like spreading herself thin, and that this one worked because the material already existed.
What the list actually shows
Twelve or so videos, and no house style. Mulhern for the early narrative work, then a bassist with a phone-sized crew in Skerries, then a French director with a UKMVA shelf and a production company behind him.
The pattern that does hold is that the good ones were made by people with a reason to be there. Molly Keane knew what Moore Street meant. Deegan grew up in Skerries. We had been in rooms with that band before anyone was queueing outside them. Arnold had the Bird footage sitting on a drive and a genuine attachment to the song.
If you are a band trying to work out who to hire, that is the more useful lesson than any of the credits above. Budget sets the ceiling. Proximity sets the floor.