To Bell and Back: Interview with Bell X1

Sipping afternoon coffees in a quiet Dublin hotel bar, Paul Noonan, Dave Geraghty and Dominic Philips – collectively known since the year 2000 as Bell X1 – are recalling the memorable day in 2011 when, just a short hop away from where we’re all sitting, they played a rooftop gig in front of one of the most famous faces on the planet.

“We were asked to play a gig on the roof of the Facebook building,” says Dom. “It sounded like an alright thing to do on a Friday afternoon. And we were doing The Late Late Show the same night. We were a bit to and fro. And Mark Zuckerberg just happened to be in town, coincidentally. And then, obviously if you own a building in the town that’s where you go.

“So he was there. We met him afterwards, briefly. We were pushed together for a photograph, and there were a few awkward words, or something.”

Paul cringes at the memory. “Oh, Christ! I tried to talk about Apple. I think I said to him that, ‘This was our Beatles on the Apple building moment’. And he kind of looked at me strangely and said, ‘The Beatles played on Steve Jobs’ building?’”

That rooftop gig – which was live-streamed on Facebook to a massive global audience – happened around the time of their Bloodless Coup album. We’re meeting today, three albums on, to discuss their seventh studio release, Arms. While Bell X1 have had many breaks over the years, the Dublin band have never quite broken internationally in the way that some of their contemporaries have.

“I suppose we’ve always been difficult to pigeonhole,” Paul observes. “We’re often referred to as the underdog that deserves more, or something. It’s not something we propagate, I hope.”

The singer cheerfully admits that they don’t make it easy for themselves. “We leap around stylistically a lot. In the UK, that’s definitely hurt us. From our time there with Island and Universal, they were very sort of bemused at this disparity between songs on the same record and what they would choose for singles, and what the selling point would be and what the hook would be. We kinda go, ‘Oh yeah. Maybe there should be something more coherent going on here.’ I find it odd.”

Bell X1 have just released their seventh studio album, Arms. But can they explain the title? “Arms to hug you, arms to fight you with,” Paul laughs. “It feels like an inclusive sort of embracing record.”

Arms race? “That too!”

Their previous album, 2013’s Chop Chop, was so named because they recorded it in a fortnight. Delivered more than a year after it was due, the three Bellies (keyboardist Glen Keating was also drafted in) spent more time working on Arms than on any other Bell X1 effort. Produced by themselves and recorded in Dublin and Donegal by Tommy McLoughlin (Villagers, Soak), it was mixed by Peter Katis (The National), with Ross Dowling mixing the beats-heavy ‘Out Of Love’.

“It’s not quite true that Chop Chop only took two weeks,” says Dom. “We had spent quite a bit of time prepping it. I guess we don’t really give ourselves a schedule. We don’t give ourselves X amount of time. We just sit down, get together, and do some stuff: ‘That’s what we’re going to do for the next while.’ That while then becomes whatever. Because we didn’t have a deadline or a specific time to record it, we sort of tried out a few things, went to a few different studios, and recorded in our own space. We started to expand on ideas and not be as focused as we might have been.”

“I suppose it would’ve been great to be out gigging earlier and to be into that realm of engaging with people and getting the songs out, but it just didn’t feel right for a long time,” says Paul. “I’m often overwhelmed by all the music I have yet to listen to that’s out there. I didn’t want to add to the noise. Didn’t want to put something out without being able to fully stand over it and be truly engaged with getting out there and performing it.”

As with their last few albums, Arms is out on their own Belly Up label. If previous Bell X1 releases have drawn favourable comparisons with Talking Heads, they’re sounding a lot less poppy and fast-paced here. The overall mood is elegantly bruised, bittersweet and melancholic, but also spirited, determined and optimistic.

If they were still signed to a major label, however, the nine highly eclectic songs featured – lyrical subject matters include the financial crisis, global warming, deafness, fatherhood and the travails of touring – would undoubtedly lead to a lot more of that frustrated record company executive head-scratching.

“This record doesn’t have an overarching theme or manifesto message wise,” Paul says. “So we’re left scrambling to sort of tie the songs together in their narratives. It’s sort of taking a photograph of the band in a point in time. That’s what our records are, I think.”

Your Hot Press correspondent has interviewed Bell X1 on several occasions – the first time in 2008 in a West Hollywood hotel. We’re all older and wiser now, but even back then the serious-minded trio weren’t obvious hell-raisers. Indeed, their genuine decency may well be their ‘rock cred’ undoing.

The band at this particular point in time come across as three talented, intelligent and friendly fathers, each in his early forties, who appear relatively happy with their lot in life and their place in the Irish rock pantheon.

“There’s a lot of luck involved in various levels of success,” Dom points out. “We’ve been quite lucky where we are, and we could be luckier. But we have to accept the luck, or the luck part of it. You do what you can.”

“You kinda get to a stage where you’re like, ‘What is success?’” adds Dave. “It’s being creatively fulfilled, by my definition. Being able to do what you do full time – we’re doing that. We’re not away from our families too much, which is really important. It’s a balance.”

All three band members contribute creatively to the work. That work/family balance is addressed on ‘I’ll Go Where You Go’, a song Dave wrote about the difficulties of touring when you have young children (“What if they need us the other side of the world? / Can our voice down the line really save them?”).

“Part of what we do means you’re away from your family and your responsibilities and everything that grounds you,” explains Dave. “You’re working. I suppose there’s a certain sense of guilt maybe associated with it. When they’re sick or shit hits the fan at home or whatever, you’re not there. And it’s the physical thing, where the first week is like, ‘Wow, look at this! Look at that! America, cool, let’s go to the diner… again!’

“And, you know, the second week you start to miss them, and the third week is hard. It’s during that time when it’s hard, you start to want to go (whiney voice), ‘I wanna go home now!’ Click my heels! It’s this little account of the emotional pull and drag that you feel when on tour. It’s the joy of being able to do what we do clashing with the, ‘Everything’s okay, baby,’ down the phone.”

While they’re not quite global superstars (yet), Bell X1 have many European, American and Australian fans. They regularly tour abroad, but try not to overdo it.

“The longest tour we’ve done was six weeks, and that was insane for us,” says Dom. “I think we went from the States straight to Europe, something like that. And it ended up being six weeks through trial and error. We kinda found three weeks is a definite line if you have four weeks. The fourth week is so difficult that it affects week two and three. You can do three weeks, go home for a week, then do another three weeks, and come home for a week, and repeat that, but to go longer is hard.”

Have they read Nick Cave’s tour-inspired book, The Sickbag Song?

“No, but I have my own signature series – a sickbag signature series,” laughs Paul. “One of my most prized possessions. Dom made me a hand-illustrated Paul Noonan signature series of sick bags, because I was a puker for a while.”

“They were totally random, that was the thing!” adds Dom. “After a few jars you could be fine. Then you could have two drinks and be very ill.”

Do you all party much on the road? Or are Bell X1 gym-bunnies?

Dom chuckles. “We bring the gym gear. We don’t go to the gym. We’re pretty professional, I think. But we party more than we do at home because no one is going to wake you.”

Another song on Arms, ‘Take Your Sweet Time’, was inspired by a video Paul found online about a medical breakthrough that meant that people who were profoundly deaf were suddenly able to hear for the first time. The footage showed a 40-year-old Englishwoman reacting to hearing sounds for the very first time in her life: “Had she imagined the sound of her voice?/ Had she imagined the ocean of noise/ And was it all like what she had drawn?/ Like what she had imagined?”

“Her name was Joanne Milne,” Paul explains. “She wrote a piece in The Guardian, I think it was. She hadn’t heard until the age of forty. I know there are lots of them out there, now, but it was one of the first videos that captured that moment. The nurse was reading the days of the week. She was incredibly overwhelmed by the sense, as you could imagine. It’s a very moving thing to see. I think the internet’s great for that sort of thing. There’s a lot of emotional pornography out there as well, but sometimes, things can be really affecting.”

Another standout song, ‘Sons and Daughters’, addresses the trashy state of the planet and how our descendants will perceive us: “Oh my distant sons and daughters/ I hope you can forgive yourselves/ and I hope you forgive me/ Oh my distant sons and daughters/ There were too many distractions/ Too much good TV.”

Paul: “Yeah. Having kids makes you ponder that a little more, the idea of what we’re doing to the planet for future generations, and it’s our inability to be long-sighted about that. Often people feel a little paralysed by the problem, read about it, and wonder what the Jaysus can be done. And then they go about reading, I don’t know, something trivial. I can do that quite easily, read something and be quite affected by it, and the next minute snap out of it.

“With that song, where we ended up with it was quite telling about the journey of the record. We tried to resist the temptation to go straight for the jugular, to go ‘totes emosh’ (wags fingers and smiles) in the way that we may have in the past. Especially with a song like that, presenting heavy topics in a pretty light – jaunty for want of a better word – fashion. We liked that sort of juxtaposition that happened with quite a few songs.”

Right now, Bell X1 are gearing up to tour the world yet again, and showcase their shiny new sonic wares. World domination isn’t the expectation, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race.

“We do find when we tour, we’re sort of breaking into places we haven’t been before,” says Paul. “It’s very grassroots. We talk to the press, we play gigs, and the shows build organically. In terms of plugging into the great machine of promo and publicity, we haven’t done that globally in the way we’ve done it here.

“There’s no formula for this. That’s no revelation, but this record has been the most difficult that we’ve made, having made six before – the last, Chop Chop, being relatively easy and pleasant. So we’re looking forward to putting it out there.”

Arms is out now on Belly Up Records. Bell X1 play Live at the Big Top, Limerick (October 28), Cork Opera House (29), Mandela Hall, Belfast (November 4) and St Columb’s Hall, Derry (5).