Fontaines D.C. call for more mental health support for artists

Fontaines D.C. have called out for more mental health support for artists in the music industry.

• Read more: Fontaines D.C.: “We weren’t really eating and we were burning the candle at both ends”

The Irish band’s frontman Grian Chatten has opened up about their gruelling tour schedule during gigs for their 2019 debut album Dogrel and how difficult mentally it was to manage.

“It’s dangerous, you know, even without the drugs,” he told Music Week. “The big killer for us was a lack of sleep. We’d have a flight in between gigs as our allocated sleep time. So that was rough and made us very bitter about the whole thing, and we started to see each other and everyone we worked with as the devil.

“Then we started to realise that we were bringing it all upon ourselves, and we started asking ourselves again, ‘What exactly do we want out of it?’”

He added: “A huge thing for us was just being clever about routing on tours and ensuring that you can get some time off, or that you’re not doing too many drives after gigs. These things add up and they can destroy [a band].”

The issues forced the band to cancel a string of festival dates in 2019 while they took time to recuperate.

Chatten said support from Kate Tempest and IDLES during the band’s rise helped them to get through their mental stress.

“Kate Tempest has been really good and Nadine Shah,” Chatten added. “And Joe Talbot from IDLES, particularly around that [US] tour, he just really looked after me. When we toured with Idles in America, I think they had just come out of their growing pains, whereas we were just about to go into that. So it was good to have a band like them around. I loved touring America; it was hard but I loved it.”

He also previously told NME about the difficulties of the band’s rise to the fore.

“It wasn’t even the rise of the band that was head-spinning,” Chatten said. “It was the pace and the relentlessness of it. I really did feel like we were put into a chamber that spins around and you come out the other side. I don’t really know what’s gone on for the last year, I’ve been so focused on what we’ve been doing.

The band were recently locked in a battle for the Number One spot in the UK albums chart with Taylor Swift .

‘Folklore’ held on to the top spot by 3,500 chart sales ahead of the Irish band’s ‘A Hero’s Death’.

Meanwhile, Fontaines recently added four extra dates to their 2021 UK tour.

For help and advice on mental health:

• ‘Am I depressed?‘ – Help and advice on mental health and what to do next
• Help Musicians UK – Around the clock mental health support and advice for musicians
• Music Support Org – Help and support for musicians struggling with alcoholism, addiction, or mental health issues
• YOUNG MINDS – The voice for young people’s health and wellbeing
• CALM – The Campaign Against Living Miserably for young men
• Time To Change – Let’s end mental health discrimination
• The Samaritans – Confidential support 24 hours a day

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