It's been over a decade since 'Neither Am I' the debut album by Kildare natives, Bell X1. A reputation for notable live performances, a witty way with words and a skill for creating understated yet memorable melodies, the band have seen their strong legion of fans grow steadily and that looks set to continue with the release of their new album 'Chop Chop'. Front man Paul Nolan speaks to Entertainment.ie about song writing, the Anglo tapes, his idea of a pre-apocalyptic world and the bizarre reason broadcaster Anne Doyle made him cry.
'The End Is Nigh' is the latest single. If the end really was nigh, what would you do with your last day on Earth?
Oh Jesus... clear my browser history. There'd be all kinds of crazy shit going on! People would be going out riding and butchering each other. You'd have to protect your nearest and dearest from all that madness.
In the song 'Motorcades' you say the Venezuelan national anthem makes you cry. Is this true?
I'll tell you a secret, it's not me, it's a friend of mine. I've listened to it and it's not one of those real tear jerkers.
After hearing a snippet of it on your Facebook page, I thought "what the hell is this"?
I know, yeah. Things more like watching Katie Taylor and her dad, that gets me and more bizarrely when Anne Doyle finished reading the news after her last news reading, they played this sort of montage of Anne Doyle over the years and I was balling!
Are you a nostalgic kind of person, The Field Recordings was a live, acoustic retrospective of the band's early music. What was it like revisiting the old material in a new way?
It was actually pretty painful. We did about forty gigs on the tour and we had to listen back to them all. We didn't want it to be just one gig because you feel the pressure of it. We tried to capture most of the gigs on that tour and pick out the best bits. Plus it was pretty warts and all. People had been asking if we had any recording of the songs done the acoustic way and eventually on one tour we recorded the gigs. In ways without doing a best of, it's the closest we've come.
I caught your recent gig at the National Concert Hall. Did it bother you that the audience remained seated for much of the performance? You described it as 'a very grown up gig'..
We knew that that's what it was. It was the perfect space for the first part of the show when we did the new record, to communicate that. I felt like it sounded really good. For people to be seated and to just soak it in. It was a perfect space for that. The whole seated verses standing show, they're very different animals. We don't do a lot of seated shows as a full band. It was a treat to do that. A lot of people myself included wouldn't go to The National Concert Hall too often but more bands should use it, it's a beautiful space. People were happy to sit and take it in and then we got a little cabaret towards the end which was cool as well. When that did happen it had a sense of a pent up energy being released.
Some performers need a lot of feedback from the crowd; did it feel disappointing at all to not have the audience reaction, to not have them on their feet?
That can feel a bit forced as well. You play a tune and it kicks off like that and where do you go from there. I've been there myself as an audience member where a seated show will get to its feet and the band takes it down and the audience don't know what to do.
The 'Bellyboard' is a message board on your website where fans can communicate and leave commentary on your music and performances. Do you use it to get ideas or does the constant commentary ever freak you out?
I'll read it occasionally yeah; it has become a quaint relic at this stage. It was around well before Facebook and Twitter. It was the only social network platform for people at the time but now it's been left behind by Facebook and Twitter. A lot of the fans that have been with us for a long time actually still use it. Facebook is used more now. People that have become friends through it, that's what it's for. We definitely responded to people wanting us to come and play in their town through the Bellyboard, facebook and Twitter. It's a good point of contact.
You've touched on political issues with tracks like 'Sugar High'. Will the recent Anglo tapes scandal find its way into your lyrics?
Maybe, as you said Sugar High is about that and is about the broader human tendency to get high on certain thrills like that in what was a very male macho culture. These lads were having fun with other people's money and they knew that if it went tits up that they'd be bailed out by the tax payer. It just was all massively vulgar and very embarrassing given recent revelations. I've become more interested in writing about those kinds of issues and broader societal issues as far as what are our obligations to each other and what works and what doesn't. There's a song on the new record called 'A Thousand Little Downers' that in some ways touches on that and in some ways I take the piss out of myself for being a moany old man. The last verse touches on something a little more poignant, wandering around Dublin and seeing all the empty commercial spaces. Behind all those I was imagining all of the human stories with people losing their family businesses. A man looking at his accounts on his computer and his wife is trying to comfort him. That scene must have been played out so many times. I've an interested in it now.
How did the song writing begin for 'Chop Chop', is it an organic process or do you allocate song writing time?
I find as I slide into middle age I need to set aside time for writing, just go and stare at a blank page and put the work in. It's not as spacey an affair as before where you just sort of fumble along and songs happen and you bunch them into groups and call them albums. Early last year I started going to friends studios to go and spend time with a piano or guitar and built up a bunch of songs by putting the hours in. It was very satisfying for that to actually work, it was refreshing. Dave had been doing the same thing in his studio and then the three of us got together once we felt we had a bunch of songs worth working on. We recorded a lot in Dave's studio. I hate to use the word demos because it's often what ends up on released records. We whittled it down to about nine songs and then went in and made the record for real!
With the last album you used the old school approach of rehearsing the material together as a group before recording instead of recording bits separately. Was it the same this time around?
It was but it was the three of us as apposed to the five of us that recorded last time. It was more of a sparse affair. We did have a vision to keep it pretty classical, when I say classical I mean more traditional and keep any embellishments to the brass and strings world as opposed to the electronics.
There's less electronics on this album then there has been in the past...
That was a conscious decision. We talked a lot about shrinking the palette. As we worked up the songs we kept it pretty traditional- guitar, bass, drums, piano and singing. We loved the space in that. The tale of a reverb on a vocal, the decay of a kick drum as apposed to smothering all of that with delicate spindly stuff. We didn't really want to go beyond that. Brass is all that we added to the composition and then we recorded it.
You once said the last studio album; 'Bloodless Coup' was thematically inspired by changes in life at a certain age. Is there a particular theme or thread running through 'Chop Chop'?
It was less cohesive in terms of the theme. While I think it sounds like our most cohesive record from a sonic palette, thematically it's still a bit all over the shop but I'm still writing about what I know. Part 'grumpy old man', part 'hopeless romantic', part 'smart arse'. I'm still covering those bases.
Bell X 1 play the Indiependence Festival, Saturday August 3rd, Deer Farm Mitchelstown, Co Cork
By Karen Lawler