Hot Cockpit Action

The Stones circa ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, Queen’s ‘I Want To Break Free’, Foo Fighters’ ‘Learning To Fly’… these rock musician types need little encouragement when it comes to dragging up and/or dressing as airline staff. And for the HP cover shoot commemorating the release of Blue Lights On The Runway, Bell X1 rise to the task with unsettling gusto. On an overcast Saturday morning, Messrs Noonan, Geraghty and Phillips congregate at Weston Executive Airport in Leixlip for the aeronautically-themed shoot.

Fly me to the Noonan…
The frontman struts into our makeshift dressing-room. a little edgy about the “stretchy black number” he’s been promised as a skirt. We ask exactly how full a transformation Paul is willing to undertake for our amusement.
“Oh, all the way,” he says. “I think if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Here, I brought a wig...”
And there we were worrying about having to tempt him into a pair of heels. Our Paul has a natural flair for accessorising, even thinking to bring his own brooch and trolley-dolly suitcase. Our make-up artist sets to work, employing all kinds of fancy shading techniques gleaned from a midnight YouTube drag cramming session the night before.
Hair is styled in a sassy bun à la Penelope Cruz, and the transformation’s almost complete. The finishing touches are clip-on earrings, a kinky hat and falsies (eyelashes, not breasts).
After much discussion, the singer finally decides on the temporary moniker of Jackie Murphy (nothing as generic as Paula or Pauline for our chameleon). Even though his face is simply made for make-up (subtle shades of dusty purple and hues of midnight blue on his lids really make his cheekbones pop!), Paul unfortunately hasn’t got a feminine bone in his body. At first, he trudges along like a basketball player while our stylist physically adjusts his posture. “Stick your boobs out, Paul!” she commands. He replies with a disappointed, “I don’t have any!”
Our stylist/cross-dress trainer gives Mr. Noonan a masterclass in how to walk, stand and pose like a woman. Dom and Dave adapt to Paul’s new image disturbingly well, and the trio continue to talk touring practicalities while Noonan adjusts his wig and hikes up his tights.
Then comes the turning point; that surreal Catch Me If You Can moment when the three, eh, gentlemen, stride into the hangar in slow motion, pilots Dave and Dom, clearly loving their ‘70s porn star-esque get-up, and Jackie, a vision in Royal blue, who, despite speaking with a purposefully deep voice and thick Dublin accent, attracts more than a few winks and wolf whistles from the male staff at Weston Executive Airport.
At which she admittedly feels a little objectified.
Ah, what it feels like for a girl…

There’s nary a nylon stocking in sight as the group convene at a central Dublin hotel several days later. We’re here to discuss the making of Blue Lights On The Runway. Whatever nocturnal horrors the band – now down to a trio of Paul Noonan, Dave Geraghty and Dominic Phillips following the departure of Brian Crosby – may have had to endure in order to birth this baby, they’ve forged a collection of songs that go down mighty easy.
We meet Paul and Dave just as the Little Creatures-like lead-off single ‘The Great Defector’ begins to garner daytime radio airplay. Dave, the quintessential guitarist – diminutive, dark, on the nice side of broody – turns to Paul, the quintessential singer – tall, self-possessed, articulate – and says, “How difficult was it?”
Paul chews on this a moment.
“On the scale of the last four... the first one was probably the easiest, took the least amount of time,” he decides.
“The first, we were so young,” adds Dave. “We had a producer and an engineer, and it’s the first time you’re making a record, so you’re kind of going in blindly. I suppose Flock was the first record where we knew how to achieve certain things: ‘We want this to sound like that.’”
None of which quite answers the question, so I’ll put in my tuppence worth (and this is not intended to be the backhanded compliment it sounds): the less Bell X1 sound like a band the more I like them. In other words, they work best as an alt. rock chamber music ensemble rather than a full-bore rock combo.
If Blue Lights… sometimes sounds like a cousin to Dave’s excellent solo album Kill Your Darlings, or even the parlour symphonies of Lisa Hannigan’s Sea Sew, perhaps it’s because behind The Point headliners and show-stealing festival turns and Meteor Awards, Bell X1 always seemed more like an arts lab than a group with stringently defined roles. Pete Frame would have a ball inking the Bells to Juniper, Damien Rice, Neosupervital, The Frames family, Duke Special, The Cake Sale (for whom Noonan penned the exquisite ‘Some Surprise’, sung by Ms Hannigan and Gary Lightbody) and sundry other side projects.
“For Flock and this one,” Paul continues, “we had a general aim. We became more interested in classic songwriting with pretty traditional structures, but dressed in noises from boxes, synths and stuff. Obviously we’re not the first band to do that, but we really admired the work of people like Depeche Mode and New Order, who always had great songs under these...”
Dave: “Rubber canopies.”
Paul: “Yeah, they were really interestingly dressed. (But) it didn’t work out that singularly. I think with a few of the songs, while we did try that approach, it just felt gratuitous, and we would have regressed and pulled back some of that, so we’ve a bit of a mongrel on our hands again… but I think that’s our lot.”
Mongrel’s good. We’re all for pop mongrels in these parts. Of all the songs on the new album, ‘How The Heart Is Wired’ is the one that most fits the remit the band have just described. Folk rock by way of the Warped label, it sounds like it was grown in an egg and then interfered with by metal...
“Probes,” Dave interjects. “Probed to life.”
Another thing worth praising about the new Bell X1 songs is how Noonan crafts lyrics that are extremely detailed, poetic with a small ‘p’, embroidered with the bits and bobs of everyday life: Cornettos and underwire bras and so forth.
“I think that’s been quite divisive with this record,” Paul admits. “People either really like that or really don’t. There’s a fear of being the smartarse sometimes, it’s not something we do for cheap laughs. I’ve always loved music that said stuff with a smile and had the stuff of, I suppose, everyday banality in them. Y’know, (The Flaming Lips’) ‘A Spoonful Weighs A Ton’ opens with, “Although they were sad/They rescued everyone”. That always raises a smile. I played drums on some of Gemma Hayes’s first record, and we were in Dave Fridmann’s studio in upstate New York just after the Flaming Lips had made Yoshimi, and there were still loads of Wayne’s drawings around, child-like action scenes and notes and stuff, you got a real sense of his presence in that space.”
Of all the fine lines on the new album, “You’re just picking the knickers from your arse/Like you’re playing a one stringed harp” has to be one of the better couplets we’ve heard this year.
Paul: “Well thank you, but I know a lot of people, my girl included, just wince and can’t deal with it!”
Well, I think if I was a girl, I’d be much more impressed with a line like that than some quasi-Byronic bullshit. Besides, who says there isn’t something mystical about the female fundament? Consider it: a direct correlation between a g-string wedgie and the plucking of Pythagoras’s monochord – perhaps in that part of the human anatomy resonates the Om of the universe…
“Maybe! It’s like a tuning fork. But yeah, I was a little torn about whether to include that song on the record or not, because of my fears of it being seen as a cheap gag, that the image would be so dominant that the point of the song would be lost. It’s a very fine line I suppose. Timing goes a long way. I don’t necessarily want to get into explaining myself, but when I sing, “Come on now ladies, they won’t fertilise themselves/Get into the ballgame, let’s clear those shelves”, that seems to have been misinterpreted as a view that I hold, where I was hopefully just pointing out that we’re fed so much aspirational lifestyle bullshit, people seem to buy it and shouldn’t.”
Well, the idea of an adopted persona is readily accepted in fiction or film, but once a singer uses the ‘I’ word, the audience often assume it’s confessional, probably because music is so emotionally potent.
“We don’t have the luxury of that degree of separation I suppose,” Paul concedes. “Sometimes it works, with a song like ‘Rocky Took A Lover’ it’s the story of these two characters, but if you don’t explicitly play a narrator in that situation, if you’re speaking in the first person, it is assumed I suppose.”
The compensation is, you get to connect directly with vast numbers of people in a way that practitioners of other arts can’t.
“Yeah, it’s the most like mainlining, of all the art forms. Certainly when you first fall for music, you become consumed by it, and I don’t think I’ve been as passionate about music since then. That’s partly to do with the fact that becoming a musician demystifies it a little, especially going to shows, you’re looking at the PA and the gear everyone’s using, and it becomes deconstructed in some way, whereas I remember my early gig experiences would have had a magic to them that certainly doesn’t exist now. But that’s part of growing up.”
Maturity being the main theme of the new album’s centerpiece ‘A Better Band’, which I hear as a sort of paean to the collaborative nature of art, the strength of the hive mind, and individuals’ capacity to co-operate with each other, often for little or no material gain, in the realm of art and performance.
“I think in its three-movement opus it is a statement of intent, to show some kind of width or breadth,” Paul says. “In some ways I suppose the song is theatrically yearning to be a better band, trying to be one by playing the song, and the second two movements I suppose would have been examples of us at our most collaborative. We often talked about it during the making of the record as the signature song, that it would be this manifesto or mission statement, without being self-indulgent.”
Dave: “Trying to not self-censor for a few minutes.”
Paul: “We’ve always been very self-conscious about being self-indulgent. While jamming is often a great act of bonding, communication without talking, a kind of feeling each other out, it rarely translates to tape. We worked on it a lot, just to have it make sense.”
So does being a better band member make you a better human being?
Dave: “Knowing how to conduct yourself for the benefit of the dynamic of the group, that is a learning curve in being, I dunno if it’s a better man, but being more conscientious I suppose. Such a large part of that is touring, when you’re most out of your comfort zone, at your most disorientated, so there are times when you have to, for the sake of everybody else, just shut the fuck up. I’m not saying to realize the madman inside you and go hide yourself away, but there are many different types of pros and cons. It’s one thing to have great musicians in the band, but being someone who is easy to tour with is a big ask, and it’s a very different thing.”
Let’s turn that around and ask another question: does the institutionalised rock ‘n’ roll life ruin you for grown up relationships?
“I don’t think one needs to compromise the other,” Paul says. “I mean, last year was by far the most intense year of touring, we finally got a record out in the States and we went for it. There’s mixed feelings about touring in the band, definitely, some of us enjoy it more than others, some of us feel a yearning for home more than others, some of us feel the separation from loved ones more than others.”
The bands who seem to weather those changes best are acts like Radiohead or U2, who all get married or have children at the same time, so each member understands what the others are going through.
Dave nods: “More empathy.”
And that’s all they’ll say about the matter. The question of marriage and parenthood versus the life of the itinerant musician flounders on the table like a fish, so I move on. A couple of hours after the interview, Dave calls my mobile and suggests meeting for a pint. Unbeknownst to me, it transpires, the band members are all recent or expectant fathers, and I’ve blundered into a subject they haven’t ever discussed on the record, and for which they haven’t quite formulated a coherent response.
It’s obviously given the band pause to think about their place in the cosmic scheme of things, most evidently on a rather lovely new tune called ‘Blow-Ins’, which, rather than referring to country boys abroad in the big cities, has a more metaphysical bent.
As Paul says, “I do feel there’s a lot more to come, and we ain’t all that.”
So has he formulated any kind of belief system predicated upon that feeling?
“No. I suppose I’d be described as a lapsed Catholic, as most people my age would be. Apart from that, I do feel that whatever is to come, we can’t comprehend it by our very limitations.”
Well, it would seem to contradict the laws of physics to assume that all the energy of the human mind is merely snuffed out at the moment of death.
“I’m not talking about an afterlife,” Paul insists, “I’m talking about evolution of the species. But I suppose the counter-argument to that would be that the energy you’re talking about is due to the mechanics of the human body, that it’s consuming energy in the form of food and light, and when it stops doing that...”
It’s all over. I guess it’s down to how closely one considers the mind and body are integrated. And now I’m confused, ’cos I do consider them integral. The body often understands what the mind doesn’t, and vice versa.
Dave: “Back to the drawing board, eh?”
Paul assumes shrink mode:
“And is it something you dwell on a lot?”
I’m past 40 – I’ve no choice!
Speaking of the afterlife: the principal recording for Blue Lights On The Runway happened in the splendidly eerie-sounding Ballycumber House in Co. Offaly in the winter of 2007. According to the album blurb, it was “built as a Castle in 1627… home to the local Lord and Lady of the day, and features many portraits of same gazing down with their beady eyes – along with lots of stuffed pheasants, wonderfully awful patterned carpet and wallpaper, standard lamps, doilies and all that malarkey. It was freezing!”
While not exactly in the Loftus Hall league, it does seem like a divinely creepy place to make an album.
“I think it was a time of year thing as well,” Paul points out, “ It was November or December, a rattle-y, draughty house where we had to keep the fires roaring.”
Dave: “A couple of nights going up those rickety stairs (I was) maybe a little bit more paranoid than one would normally be, sleeping with one eye open. And the next day you’re so worn down from not having slept properly, it’s a bit of a detachment from reality I suppose.”
Can they hear evidence of that atmosphere when they listen to the record?
“With the last song, ‘The Curtains Are Twitchin’’, it was a run-through,” Paul remembers, “and Phil Hayes, who was recording, was actually lighting the fire at the time, so you can hear crackling and banging during the take, because he’d left the desk set up recording. That’s very evocative of the moment for us. It was a wonderfully eccentric house, it had a scullery where the staff would have prepared the meals and did the laundry in the basement, and above the scullery door it had all these bells that were linked physically to the different rooms of the house, you’d press the button and it would ring the bell. It also had this exercise room in the scullery full of all these decrepit, rusty exercise machines. It was a great way of relieving the day’s tension, to go down there after recording and up onto the lethal machines.”
Dave: “Exercising the demons!”
Thank you folks, Dave will be here all week. On the subject of recording environments, Daniel Lanois reckons it’s crucial to customize the space a band is going to play in, so they don’t feel like the latest in a long line of johns.
Dave: “When we were in Westland making Flock we had a Daniel O’Donnell calendar and took all the pictures out and put them everywhere, coated a whole room with them.”
That’s certainly an incentive to get through a take without messing up.
“We gotta get out of here!”
The aforementioned ‘The Curtains Are Twitchin’’ is a fair indication of just how far the band have come since even that last album. Built around the chord sequence of Pachelbel’s Canon In D Minor (“I’m a novice piano player, so it had to be white notes,” Paul says) it’s somewhere between Eels and Robert Wyatt, with a New Orleans funeral band passing through the last act.
Paul: “There’s been a couple of moments of great modern synergy with this record in that we’ve met people online that we’ve had real relationships with and have contributed to the record. Like the dudes in New Orleans, we just went trawling online and made contact with one who put together a band, we sent him the song, they sent back the brass.”
In previous years such an enterprise would’ve cost a fortune in Rattle & Hum style musical safaris involving transatlantic flights, studio rentals etc. The patron saints of modern record production are no longer Sam Phillips or Phil Spector, but Bill Gates and Ray Kurzweil. That’s an extraordinary development.
“It is. The photographer who did all the artwork is a guy from Berlin, we just came across his work online and really liked it and started emailing him and we ended up going to Berlin and doing the shoot, and we’re actually shooting a video with him next weekend.”
Dave: “Virtual world music.”
Paul: “Even before we’d anything out there, we did shows in New York and LA on the back of some TV placements we had, a couple of songs on The OC (and Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill – PM) and when we did those shows everyone knew the songs and were singing along; there’s this online network of people who swap songs and share music and enable bands like us to do that. It’s very empowering.”
To the degree where Bell X1 are now regular guests on David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.
Dave: “Sitting down and taking photographs of each other on Dave’s chair.”
Paul: “There was an element of too-cool-for-school for a bit and then we were like, ‘Fuck this, let’s embrace it and do the photographs in the chair.’ But all that happened very early for us in America. We would’ve thought there was a certain amount of groundwork we needed to do before that happened, but it was the other way around. We got the TV shows before we did any proper touring, which in turn meant we had an audience to play to, which was great.”
Is it true that Letterman’s studio is incredibly cold?
Paul: “They say it’s to keep the comedy fresh! Which is I’m sure a line they trot out to every band that comes through. The Ed Sullivan theatre is a tiny theatre and it’s freezing cold. It’s a bit of an assembly line – it’s very together and you’re treated very well, but it’s the 14,000th show they’ve made and you just happen to be the band on that day. The greatest thing was meeting Artie Fufkin, the Polymer Records guy from Spinal Tap.”
Come again?
“Paul Shaffer was Artie Fufkin.”
The scales have fallen from our eyes.

Blue Lights On The Runway is out now.