In this global music market, Bell X1's Irish smash "Flock" surely should've arrived on American shores sooner. Skipping straight past Travis and Coldplay nods and taking aim at that other airplane band--U2--the group combines stirring vocals with a melodic power that inoculates against sap.
If you lived in Ireland, this bio wouldn't be necessary. Bell X1 released an album there called Flock that debuted at #1 on the Irish album charts, and has since gone 5x platinum. At one point a staggering four songs from Flock were in the Top 20 of Ireland's singles chart. Flock led to sold out shows at legendary Irish venues like The Point and Malahide Castle, and a live DVD Tour De Flock which the band released on their own Belly Up label. I debuted at #4 on the Irish album charts, the highest debut ever for a self-released title.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
The five members of Bell X1 - vocalist/guitarist Paul Noonan, guitarists Dave Geraghty and Brian Crosby, bassist Dominic Phillips and drummer Tim O'Donovan - have been friends for over a decade. They met in and around school in North County Kildaire, Ireland, and along with a young man called Damien Rice, went on to form their first band, Juniper. Early influences included Bruce Springsteen, REM and, perhaps most prevalently, Talking Heads. At one point, Juniper appeared on the brink of very great things. On the strength of just two singles, "Weatherman" and "The World Is Dead," they were the recipients of considerable hype: the much-welcome antithesis to Ireland's then-current reigning act, Boyzone, and touted (in the exaggerated way of these things) as the new U2. But band harmony was a scarce commodity and, within a year, Rice departed for what would become, in time, huge solo success. Rechristening themselves Bell X1, the newly minted four piece poured all their still-bubbling creative juices into an album called Neither Am I.
"We wanted to make a definite change after Juniper fell apart, and a quick one," Noonan says. "In retrospect, the album was made a little too quickly. It was very intuitive, but it was all done and dusted inside of three months. It could have done with a little more time. We were determined to take more care with the next one."
The next one took almost too long, the better part of three years, but its sometimes fraught genesis was worth it. 2003's Music In Mouth went on, quite rightly, to be regarded a classic. Created, says Noonan, "as an observatory, cathartic and deeply personal record," Music In Mouth teemed with textures and moods, at once joyful ("Snakes & Snakes," "Alphabet Soup") and uncommonly moving ("In Every Sunflower," "I'll See Your Heart," and I'll "Raise You Mine"). It also confirmed Noonan, a voracious reader of everyone from Jack Kerouac to John McGahern and James Joyce, as a lyricist of both rare insight and a delightfully deadpan humor. On Music In Mouth's "Next To You," for example, he sings: "I'm a little all over the shop/Like those souvenirs from Knock/That come all the way from China."
"To be honest, I always thought that songwriting, like gymnastics, was what other people did - not me," he says. "But it actually came pretty naturally, and I do love it. As a language, songwriting is somehow far more communicative than I could be otherwise. It touches the places I alone couldn't."
Music In Mouth made Bell X1 a huge success in their homeland, where they toured with the likes of Snow Patrol, Keane, Starsailor and Aqualung. The album also prompted some more unconventional tour experiences. In 2003, Ireland held the presidency of the European Union, and they sent these rising stars on a tour of Eastern Europe's Ascension States (Bratislava, Krakow, Warsaw, Budapest), where they played in front of bemused, if enthusiastic, local diplomats. "It was a very surreal experience," notes Noonan, "but also a fascinating one and, in many ways, the reason why we became a band in the first place: to experience absolutely everything, the world over."
Which brings us back to where we started, with Flock, a gorgeous album full of lyrical gems and songs that are, by turns, vigorous and aggressive, majestic and elegant, from four men at the top of their game. Noonan, like David Byrne and Nick Cave before him, is a songwriter capable of picking the bones of any social situation to reveal hidden depths and a sometimes tortured melancholy. The wistful "Bad Skin Day," for example, is about the "general sense of inadequacy" Noonan occasionally suffers from; "Rocky Took A Lover" concerns itself with a local Dublin tramp who, one night, finds himself a lady friend; and Natalie is about a woman the singer may or may not have been taken with some years previously.
"I found some notes I'd written about her a while back," he says, "but I can't, for the life of me, remember whether she was real or not."
Flock arrives here in February 2006 via Yep Roc Records, at which point Dublin's best-kept secret will become, finally, common knowledge to us all. And because of this, Paul Noonan, the well-read, at once confident and retiring frontman who doesn't just sing but plays the drums and also, if you're asking, the kazoo, will breathe a sigh of relief.
"The vibe we seem to be getting from everybody right now is, go forth and conquer," he says. "And that's precisely what we intend to do." Their time has come, and their time is now.
