The X-factors

Clarke’s fantastic poetic metaphor for female beauty lends itself wonderfully to the title of the second Bell X1 album. It’s a record charged by magic and loss, confusion and celebration and ultimately, a potent case of music in mouth nourishing the heart and soul.

While perhaps not quite as immediate as its predecessor it is a far more realised and satisfying record than their Neither Am I debut.
“The huge difference between this record and the last is that this is far more collaborative,” singer Paul Noonan believes. “We spent three weeks in a house in Wexford just down the road from the Ten Speed Racer boys who we shared a dartboard in the local with.”
“When we released the first album we were very much in the hangover of Juniper and fumbling as a band to try and get some kind of a cohesive sound,” Dave Geraghty maintains. “On Neither Am I myself and Paul would bring bits of ideas together, but this was very much a joint effort. When we were making this one, we’d go to bed at night still buzzing from songs that would come out from the most unusual circumstances. That house in Wexford had a huge part to play. There might be a plaque outside it someday!”

Music in Mouth developed into a far more diverse animal than the initial gameplan.
“When we started this record I wanted to make something like Television, early Talking Heads or Blondie,” Paul reveals. “A really spiky, skinny white boy record. It rang hollow and we had a lot of songs in that form, but I needed to write about certain things that couldn’t be expressed in such a form which is why the record is as all over the shop as it is.”
Or as a great line in ‘Next to You’ puts it, “I’m a little all over the shop / Like those souvenirs in Knock that come all the way from China.” Music in Mouth is full of lovely pen pictures – a world of tomato coated spaghetti, white water noise and games full of snakes bereft of any ladders.
“I keep a Dictaphone with me all the time and I type stuff in to my phone all the time,” Paul offers by way of explaining some of the more unusual lyrics. “I tend to record these things when they come to me. A lot of the lyrics for ‘Snakes & Snakes’ were written on the back of a Bertie Ahern pamphlet that came through the letterbox. I write stuff on anything I can find, put them together and attempt to crowbar them into song form.”

By coincidence, songs conceived on propaganda leaflets from our Beloved Leader are being rapturously received in the UK, from whence the Bellies have just returned.
The reception now afforded to Irish artists in Britain seems to have radically changed from the days when our favourite sons and daughters were regularly left out to dry by the inkies. This summer alone, The Thrills have gone straight to number three with So Much For the City, Bell X1’s former Juniper colleague Damien Rice has rocketed through the roof, while The Frames have sold out London’s Union Chapel and performed a veritable corker at Glastonbury, now reaching audiences beyond the Paddy Diaspora that normally throng their away fixture list.

“We were doing an interview with BBC 6 Music with a guy whose whole programme is based on what he calls the Irish boom,” Dave states. “The whole U2 hangover of the eighties has finally cleared so it’s really exciting to be involved now. The Dublin sound was a bad word for a while but now it’s really turned itself inside out.
“There is a great sense of camaraderie in Dublin right now,” Noonan agrees. “I’d love to see someone do a Reindeer Section here. I think there is a lot of similarities between here and Glasgow in that there are so many brilliant records coming out here that people have put out themselves and built a fanbase really organically. I think Graham Hopkins would be the man to orchestrate it. He has got the blagger’s tongue!”

Another development of recent times is that the those three words “major record deal” don’t seem to be as dirty as they were even a year ago, as your local record shop right now is racked up with The Thrills (Virgin), Snow Patrol (Polydor), Halite (Warners) and Bell X1 (Island).
“Sometimes I do feel paranoid about it because most of my friends who are making music are doing it independently,” Noonan admits. “I know it’s a paranoia, but there is a perceived lack of integrity in getting in bed with a corporation whose mother company does French water treatment, that company being Universal. But there has been no bending from their point of view. The deal that Island pitched at us was that Island wanted to re-establish itself as the label in the Universal group that allows bands to make three or four records before they start making money in the tradition of their great back catalogue artists like Bob Marley.”
Having jumped through hoops of hype with Juniper, the Bell X1 boys are more than a little wiser.

“We are fearful of the bombastic marketing ploys that were used in the Juniper days,” David says. “It was a bit full on. We’d prefer people to make their own decisions and at the end of the day the best promotion is word of mouth. Word of mouth for music in mouth!”
“I don’t necessarily regret Juniper, but I do regret not making an album,” Noonan adds. “I think the perception of the band would have been a lot better had we the substance to back up all the bombast. It pissed people off at the time but we learnt hugely.”
Not only have they learnt to let the music breathe, but Bell X1 have evolved into a very interesting entity, blurring the traditional boundaries between major label and underground. Paul has been known to perform Justin Timberlake songs with the Warlords of Pez while Tim O’Donovan of Neosupervital and Settler was recently recruited as sticksman. Few would have thought that early Bell X1 would ever become such an interesting and unpredictable forcefield of activity. Future developments are bound to be interesting to say the very, very least. Bon appetite.

Music In Mouth is out now on Island