An injury for all three members could have meant curtains for Kildare electro rockers Miracle Bell. Somehow they managed to come out of the studio with all their bits still in the right places. Celina Murphy meets the indestructible trio to talk fate, mannequins and Susan Sarandon’s foray into post-punk.
It’s a hard game at the best of times, this rock ‘n’ roll lark. When all three merry men find themselves seriously injured mere weeks before they're due to start on their debut album, you’d forgive a band for thinking somebody up there is taking the piss.
Frontman Dave Prendergast remembers; “We did all kind of think, ‘Why are we all being struck down?’”
“God didn’t want us making a CD that was better than his!” jokes guitarist John Broe.
“Really, it was a very unfortunate two weeks,” Prendergast tells me. “It was as we were about to write the album. The last gig we did on the tour was in the Roisin Dubh. We had a party afterwards and our drummer ended up in a shopping trolley on the side of the hill, having to bail out to avoid a parked car. And he broke his ankle. Then he got repetitive strain injury in his other knee trying to overcompensate. Then I drove a scrambler into a ditch, hit my head off a tree and gashed my leg. I slashed it right open.”
“The lads thought he was genuinely dead,” Broe says of Prendergast’s tumble, “but I was pissing myself!”
Things didn’t seem quite so funny a few days later when it was Broe’s turn to take one for the band. Silly musicians, don’t they know bad things always come in threes?
“A shop in Naas was giving away these male mannequins,” Broe explains, “and I thought ‘The band’s going going electro, mannequins are kinda electro, it might work if they were silver!’”
It literally took about three hours to spray paint them, but it was looking savage. I ran in to the lads saying ‘You gotta come and check this out’ and they were like ‘What the fuck’s wrong with your hand?’”
‘The tendons were out to there,” he laughs, describing what I imagine is the single grossest thing a person can do to their wrist. “It took two or three weeks before I could squeeze my guitar again!” Graffiti artists and obscenity-happy hoodlums take note; sometimes a man must pay dearly for his art.
“It was a really dodgy period,” Broe says, noting for the first time the gravity of the accidents. “It was like ‘You can’t play your kick drum, I can’t play guitar…’ We gave ourselves the task of writing all the songs down in the studio over three months so it was a case of, ‘Use that hand for the mouse and use ‘the claw’ for pushing buttons!’ It was a lot of simplistic writing, which I think helped a lot, actually.”
Light Shape Sound is a collection of fuzzy electro-rock based around reeling bleeps, shoop-shoop vocals and a preoccupation with all things futuristic.
“We’re so happy with it!” Broe enthuses. “I love it! I absolutely love listening to it and that hasn’t happened with anything else we’ve done.”
Currently speeding ‘round the nation on a mammoth countrywide tour, Prendergast says the trio are no strangers to the stage.
“We started a tour in January of last year with four dates booked and we finished up at the end of May, 60 or 65 dates later!”
In a way, the electro-rockers started towards the top, winning the Platform V Battle Of The Bands competition to play Oxegen when Miracle Bell was less than a year old.
Prendergast had already been making music with school chum John Rigney when Broe, his cousin, started turning up to shows with stars in his pupils.
“He was only a nipper at the time. He said, ‘Do you want a keyboard player or a guitarist?’ and he started jamming with us. That’s when we started doing dodgy little demos in our garage.”
Broe butts in: “As a Kildare band, even though it’s only 10 miles away from Dublin, we didn’t understand the industry like bands in Dublin do. We thought, ‘I wanna play Oxegen’ and when we won, it was like, ‘What the fuck?’”
As expected, the weekend was rock ‘n’ roll all the way.
“We ended up hanging out with My Chemical Romance and Arcade Fire and all these bands, playing the Wii! The guy from My Chemical Romance was so lovely. They invited us over to watch them from side of stage!”
However, the award for celeb spotting fail of the festival has to go to young Broe, who managed to mistake Hollywood royals Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins for members of Arcade Fire!
“To be fair,” he spouts, “she had a hoodie on – she looked like a homie! I was thinking, ‘Tim Robbins, Tim Robbins… where do I know that name?’”
