How Fontaines D.C.‘s biggest show yet came to life on stage

The lighting, production and video designers behind Fontaines D.C.’s monumental Finsbury Park headline show talk two-headed pigs, nu-grunge and lasers at the band’s biggest gig to date.

It’s hard to believe that Fontaines D.C. released their critically acclaimed fourth album, Romance, just under a year ago. Since then, the band have gone from strength to strength, drawing in legions of new fans by the day. Behind slick, stadium-ready hits like Starburster and Favourite, their current tour includes an equally slick stage design featuring abstract motifs from their latest album, live video recordings and acidic colour schemes. In our 2024 cover story with the band, writer Francis Blagburn wrote that Romance contained “plenty of imagery [with] a twisted, nu-metal melodrama.” This is what the team behind the stage design took into account while creating the tour visuals.

Yet there is substance, too, amidst all the style. At the end of their set, the screens lit up with the words, ‘Israel Is Committing Genocide. Use Your Voice.’ The politically-charged Finsbury Park show, which featured support from Australian punk group Amyl and the Sniffers and Irish rap trio Kneecap, feels like the band completing their victory lap. To pull off a show like this, it takes a team of set designers, videographers, lighting designers, engineers and technicians. To find out what goes on in the months leading up to such a spectacle, we spoke to Ross Chapple and Nick Jevons from lighting and production design studio Auratecture, and Kira O’Brien from video design studio Fray.

We asked them to talk us through the initial moodboard stage, collaborating with Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos and Deego, and how to create an intimate connection between the artist and their fans when playing to such a huge crowd. 

How does the creative process begin for a show like this?

Ross Chapple: This project has been a little bit different because we didn’t start with a blank canvas. The profile of the band and their shows has skyrocketed over the last year or two, and we were approached to put forward some concepts to uplift the size and significance of the production. We were trying to work with existing material and existing direction to some degree, but we wanted to provide the audience with a fresh view of the Fontaines show within those boundaries, whilst maintaining some of their original style. We’re working alongside their existing lighting director, for example, Miles Weaver, who had already created a really solid foundation. We came in to elevate it tenfold to these new huge audiences that Fontaines are playing in front of now. 

Kira O’Brien: [Fray] were then approached for the video side of it by Ross and Nick with the information that they’d already collected. We were given a brief with keywords, and came back with some initial ideas of what we could provide. It was very much live camera-based; they wanted real-time video to be incorporated. We came back with some creative ideas that felt like they fit with the band’s colour scheme.

What did that initial brief look like? 

RC: A lot of the visual references we ran with initially were from small room punk shows – the kind where you see sweat dripping off the walls, people crowd surfing, almost hitting the ceiling, getting wrapped up in microphone cables. This was then juxtaposed with something more modernistic, neo-Gothic, acidic and grungy, like scenes from The Matrix. ‘Acidic’ and ‘grungy’ are two key words that were very prominent and that lent into the vivid, acidic, fluorescent colourways that they’ve got going on around the Romance album artwork. We referenced some fashion shows, too – there was a Rick Owens show in there. Overall, the mood board was a mixture of modern influences with classic punk connotations.

KO: Then we looked at 90s skit videos. There was a lot of grunge, but also that slightly clean aesthetic, and a little bit of pop art in how the backgrounds read, how the colours pop against the live camera, and how we colourised the live camera.

How involved were the band themselves in the process? What kind of input did they have?

RC: Carlos and Deego are really, really involved. They obviously have a real solid vision of what they would like to see, and what they think their music should look like visually. They’ve been very hands-on with the process, actually providing feedback and notes to each revision. It’s been a perfect balance of creative freedom and direction from those guys, so it’s been a real pleasure getting an understanding of not just how they create this musical landscape, but also how they have a vision of how they think that should look – which is not always the case with musicians. A lot of the time, music is their art and that’s what they’re able to offer, but with these guys, they definitely had a vision for how the show should look too.

What do you think Fontaines D.C. fans expect from the visuals at their shows? Do you think that these visuals match their expectations or subvert them in any way?

RC: First and foremost, the fans want to see the band. That’s why the video and camera thing became the leading element. They’re going into outdoor arenas for 30,000 people. They need to be seen a long, long way back. Beyond that, there’s a lot of  distorted shapes and objects, like the Romance heart and the double-headed pig. There’s a lot of iconography that surrounds the band and their visual identity. I’ve had a copy of the Romance LP up front and centre in my record collection for a while. I love that artwork, and I know a lot of fans probably do, so we all collectively felt that’s something we should lean into. It was great to have the opportunity to do that on such a large scale. We could use the video as a giant light source, working with the set piece of the heart and the negative space within that. 

NJ: This is the first time there’s been that many fans seeing them on this scale, so they wouldn’t really know what to expect. We wanted them to still feel a part of the show, because their audience has always seen them in a more intimate venue. When you see a band in an intimate venue, you feel a part of the band’s story and journey, and sometimes that can be lost on the next level up. We wanted to retain that connection between fan and audience.

KO: It’s not just the scale. It’s also the first time introducing video, so it had to still feel like the band. It just had to be their vibe. We had a conversation with them about needing to create not just the vibe on stage, but the vibe that was there all the time. They wanted the audience to see them. They wanted something that felt clean and beautiful, but still resembled them, and would allow the show to read. Then, obviously, you have to incorporate these beautiful colours, and this whole ethos of the band, to punch through and come across as an extension of who they are.

RC: We all wanted to go bold and daring with the video looks. We wanted to go against the grain. It’s punk, you know? I mean, it’s what punk music stands for. We wanted to do that visually as well, so we didn’t want to be afraid of really cranking those acidic colours and those pop art, Andy Warhol-esque looks.

Do you have a highlight or favourite moment from the show? 

RC: I have a couple of favourite moments from the show. One of them is Starburster because we’ve all absolutely gone to town visually with the programming of the video and the lighting in that. We incorporated the double-headed pig during the piano line in the record, and it is an absolute crowd pleaser. When I saw that at Primavera, the camera phones all came out because people are obviously familiar with that asset from the flyers, and it just looks incredible on a big LED video wall. It’s just such a nice moment that fits the music really well. The energy is through the roof because there are all these glitch effects being applied to the camera feeds, and some laser programming going on. We have a singular laser which focuses back onto the heart set piece, which we felt was a nice addition because lasers give a real hypermodernistic look. They aren’t part of your arsenal, usually, for a punk show. 

There’s another effect that we’ve all created, which is a video of the Romance heart that gets overlaid on the audience’s faces when the cameras point to the audience. It doesn’t get used in a track, per se, but it gets used before the encore begins. You can just see people in the crowd clapping and waving, and the next thing they know, the Romance heart has augmented itself over their faces. It just brings the audience into that visual world and it’s really engaging.

KO: Yeah, we threw the kitchen sink into this show, if I’m being honest. There are certain things that you can create within real-time that utilise background removal, where it actually cuts the person out. We also used face tracking. Both these things take teamwork to make, especially with the background removal in the video, because it means the camera director has to find the right shots, and the lighting programmer and director have to light the band correctly so that these effects can work. It’s more than just adding video to a show. It’s actually bringing the entire creative direction together, which is what I love about bringing video in and live cameras onto the back screen. Instead of it being these different elements, it’s a collaborative show. It feels cohesive and like a beautiful, theatrical thing.

What kind of emotions and atmosphere did you want to provoke with the design?  

NJ: We wanted people to be exhausted. They’ve just spent all their energy and emotions on watching the show, being sucked into it, feeling a part of it. They’ve just entered into this hour and a half of intense activity, and then when it ends, they’re like, ‘Oh god, what happened there?’ Knackered. That’s what we wanted.

KO: It’s about making it feel like the music as well, though, isn’t it? I do feel that you can see their current identity in the show through the colours and the black and white. It’s about being sucked in and making it feel like who they are and their music.

Did you want to create a narrative arc or journey through the design? 

RC: The band like complete flexibility over their set list. One night, the set list will be upside down, for example. I think the show follows a natural dynamic on its own because they have tracks from their earlier albums, like Dogrel and A Hero’s Death that are super, super high energy, but then we have tracks like I Love You, which are more monochromatic, and then the mood comes down. There’s a natural dynamic that’s been created in the design to suit the music that we’re timelining, regardless of which way around the set list is. 

NJ: They know best their music and how it flows. I think it’s testament to what we’ve done because it could just slot in any order, and there’s still a show flow to it because we’ve treated each individual song. We’ve thought about each individual track and treated it, so it just sits well with the music. When the band want to change the set around, they can do that knowing that they’ll still have the flow that they want.

You’ve mentioned how much Fontaines’ history influenced the design. Are there any subtle, hidden details or symbols that the audience might miss or that only super fans would notice?

RC: Yeah, for the super fans, there’s a specific video look in A Hero’s Death, which is tied to the album artwork. That’s one for the real heads. 

KO: It’s there in A Hero’s Death and Televised, which are both from the same album, and it pushes more to a cyanotype, print feel, which fits with the rest of the show. The way the print effect is allows for a solid, monochromatic background with the white over the top, which we pushed into for those couple of songs. We tried to match it and make it feel like the artwork with those two colours. There are also symbols in Here’s The Thing – which we amazingly found were actually drawn by the lighting designer a long time ago, with the bands’ input, which play in the choruses. They’re a nice nod to who they really are.