Live at the Marquee brings joy for Bell X1
Bell X1 in Cork as they look forward to playing Live at the Marquee this weekend.
Bell X1 was founded in 1999, but the trio of vocalist Paul Noonan, multi-instrumentalist David Geraghty and bassist Dominic Phillips have been playing together since the mid ’90s in Juniper, the band from which Bell X1 emerged. The very same people may be sitting together before your scribe recently at the Glass House at the Montenotte Hotel, where they later performed an intimate gig to an audience of 96FM competition winners, but having learned that the three had travelled separately to get here I wonder if a potential elephant in the room should be addressed – a rift in the band!
“That’s how you stay in a band for decades,” smiles Phillips with a straight bat.
“And then when we hear how much Dom is spending on his transport I go, ‘well, I’ll need more. I’ll need an extra deck on my bus,’” insists Geraghty.
“Yeah, yeah. You like the train – I like a chauffeur,” the bassist responds dismissively. “That’s the way it is”
“And if it has to be a train, separate carriages,” offers Noonan in his customary quiet-spoken manner.
“If not separate trains,” Phillips contends.
“Right.”
You are welcome to draw your own conclusions from that exchange, dear reader, but I can truthfully report that I am meeting a band currently basking in the warm glow of a most fulfilling album recording session. Before sitting down with the band I find myself engaging in small chat with Paul Noonan – amongst other things he’s as perplexed as all of us by RTÉ Radio One’s new corporate jingle makeover – and apropos of noting he proudly shares his delight at the speed in which the band recorded their ninth studio album in The States in April.
This is interesting news. And good news. The last time Bell X1 rattled through a recording session they produced what could be considered their best album, 2013’s Chop Chop. It’s certainly regarded by the band as their most cohesive. Given that that album was recorded in Connecticut with Peter Katis and Thomas Bartlett it seems their latest excursion Stateside was made to emulate that achievement.
“We were invited over to play in the Irish Arts Center in New York,” says Geraghty, as he explains the band’s thinking. “It was the first time we were over in the States in a few years, and we just thought: well, we’d been working on new material, we’ve got these summer gigs coming up, a summer tour, and I think I was the first to say, ‘Let’s go over to America and do another Chop Chop.’ Because after Chop Chop it took us forever to make an album. We thought we had the fine art of making an album down to a tee. But Arms took….”
He takes a pause as he considers their 2016 release. “You know, it was like, yeah, it was as painful as an arms race.”
“It was more than two weeks,” adds Phillips ruefully.
“Oh, it was more than two weeks,” agrees Geraghty. “Yeah. Chop Chop was 13 days. So, we’ve beaten our record and we’ve made this one in 10 days. Yeah. I think that really works for us. It forces the hand of being really prepared upfront.”
Their producer, Josh Kaufman, was conducive to a spontaneous, minimal frills approach. The Brooklynite has collaborated with The National, Josh Ritter and Taylor Swift among many others, but Bell X1 are particularly taken by his own band, the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman. They also share management.
“Josh is an incredible musician. He’s an all-rounder,” Geraghty enthuses. “Because there’s three of us it’s harder to realise a full sound. So, Josh was another band member in the room when we were making the album, so immediately there was energy caught, as he says, off the floor. So, it was great.
“Like there was one song in particular where we said, let’s just stick the flag in the ground was the attitude. And everything had been going great up to that point, so why shouldn’t we! We had that confidence. And literally, the first take we did of just trying something was the one we went back to. So, it was that kind of energy. It was really, really great. That’s the best way to make an album. Not takes two years of messing around with overdubs and what about this, what about that?”
There is also something to be said for there being a different sensibility on the other side of the Atlantic when it comes to recording.
“There’s something nice as well about having a small window, so you’re forced to trust whoever you’re working with,” notes Phillips. “And then it’s like, you don’t stop much to think so you just get on and…”
“You just throw yourself into it,” finishes Geraghty.
Phillips: “And stuff comes out, and you’re capturing a thing as opposed to chasing many things over a long period of time.”
“We were wondering was it a voltage thing,” ventures Noonan to sniggers, indicating that this has become a familiar musing from the singer. “The fact that they run at 110. There’s a really lovely, earthy, coarse, matt quality to some American recordings.”
“Great for recording,” chimes in Phillips. “No good for boiling a kettle.”
“Exactly,” nods Noonan. “But the tea game is weak because they don’t really do kettles.”
“That’s why they drink so much coffee.” The other two note simultaneously.
“We initially had the idea of doing this record as a gather moment,” suggests Noonan, “which is what we would do at shows often where the three of us just get around a single mic with two acoustics and a double bass. It grew into something that felt like a really kind of profound connection between us.”
The initial expectation may have been to embellish the songs later, but guided by Kaufman’s instruction to treat the emotion as the most important component – when it came to considering overdubbing tracks he advised the band to ask themselves if that would make the emotional connection stronger or mask it – they appear to have on occasion chosen the rawer option.
Noonan reflects: “There are a couple of those kinds of songs on the record where we’ve just left them as that, as the three of us. Or having that sort of spirit to them at least. That was a lovely find. That room really lent itself to doing that.”
That room was Dreamland Studio, a 130-year-old deconsecrated wooden church in upstate New York, which has hosted the likes of the B-52s Suzanne Vega, 10,000 Maniacs, Fleet Foxes, and The National.
There is also another space they are looking forward to visiting, the Marquee tent, which they first played in 2007 and five more times since.
Noonan has his own views on that: “I think there is a particular energy about the Marquee because it feels like there’s a sense of occasion when it goes up every year, and that there’s a sort of gratitude for it being there and you can feel that in the tent. It’s always a bit of a cacophonous, euphoric, sort of clattery, joyous thing.
“Tents are by their nature that way inclined. Everything gets amplified.”
Bell X1 play Live at the Marquee on Friday, June 19.
