“I’ve kind of ambivalent feelings about sharing all that,” Paul chuckles, “because it probably does shatter some illusions.”
So what strategies do Bell X1 employ in order to maintain sanity on the road?
“Occasionally taking a trip off the motorways to find farm shops, and there’s a few old diners around the border between Scotland and England on older roads, family-run businesses that become something to look forward to. Beyond Carlisle it’s a little grim!”
So it’s like an anthropological expedition with gigs tacked on the end?
“Exactly. The dominance of the service stations and stuff, it’s a little soul sapping, which you can probably detect from the scribblings. But continental Europe is definitely a lot different than in the UK. Our first taste of it was opening for a guy called Tom McCrae, who was huge in France. We did maybe 12 shows with him, and they seem to like serious music there. You go into the big chainstores and you’ll always see the PJ Harveys and the Tindersticks and the Nick Caves up in the charts.
“People seem to attend the shows as purely a cultural emotional experience, it’s not a night out. It’s probably not even meant to be enjoyed! So they were deathly silent while we were playing and rapturous applause between songs, which was very pleasant but freaky. And that laid the foundations, so when we started doing our own shows we had similarly chin-strokey audiences, certainly in France. It was all very Late Review.”
The band are of course surfing on the wave generated by their latest – and best – album Blue Lights On The Runway, which hit the number one slot in this country on its release last spring, and is also making serious headway abroad.
“In places like Holland we had a lot of airplay with ‘The Great Defector’, and in the States there’s been a lot more exposure,” Noonan enthuses, “with the result that we’re doing maybe five regional Dutch shows in the autumn run. And when we go to the States we’re extending further beyond the New York/Chicago/Boston-Irish factor. We’re getting to go to Birmingham, Alabama this time, and down to Austin and through the Carolinas. I love that aspect, seeing all the weird and wacky places.”
Their appearance on the David Letterman Show on St. Patrick’s Day last certainly looked like something of a triumph.
“Yeah, it’s a tiny theatre. So you’re a lot closer to the audience than you might glean from how they present it on telly. We did the same show as Julia Roberts. There was a massive crowd at the stage door after the show, and we left first and there was lots of hollering and lightbulb flashing and stuff. I think it died down when people realised Julia wasn’t to follow!”
Despite its technical complexity, the Blue Lights material, Paul says, is a blast to play live.
“There’s a few kind of musical wig-outs that we left in there that have taken on lives of their own,” he considers. “That early phase when we were in America and then here, the songs really developed over that month or six-week period. I think our good friend and engineer Phil Hayes, who also does our live sound, really came into his own on this record. Sonically it’s very much his doing – a lot of those atmospheres, it felt like much more of a collaborative effort with the dude twiddling the knobs.”
Plus, having the same man oversee both studio and live mixes makes the transition that much smoother. Phil knocked the album up, so he had to be there for the birth.
While we’re on that subject, the unspoken subtext of our last encounter with Bell X1 was the trials and travails of being both a working musician and a new parent. Since the album’s recording and release, all three members have become fathers. At the time however, it wasn’t something the band had considered discussing in public.
“I’m sorry about that, we just hadn’t passed resolution 2.5!” Paul laughs. “The fact that all three of us had children in a six-month period was something we’d never thought about having some kind of policy on! But yeah, it’s a brave new world. We’re all bracing ourselves for it. We were really lucky to be around for so much of the summer. But such is our lot that it’s a world of extremes. We’re either around all the time or not around at all. I think things like Skype are a blessing and a curse, they bring you so close it’s kind of teasing. We’ve never been away for a month, plus the fact that we all have young families now, it’ll be doubly intense. But it’s what we’ve chosen to do, so you get on with it, you make it work. Just before we go away I think we’re all going to descend on Electric Picnic and set up for the weekend with families.”
And you can scrap the notion that the next Bell X1 album will be a collection of sentimental C&W weepies.
“Oh, it’s the death-knell when you start getting into that. Obviously it’ll inform the writing, but hopefully not in some kind of drippy sense.”
The band recently supported U2 in Croke Park, attempting to stake out some kind of space of their own within the gigantic confines of The Claw. Which, one imagines, is a bit like trying to mount an Abbey production of Hamlet on the set of Blade Runner.
“‘I shall never play the Dane!’” Paul laughs. “It was one of those moments! It was very surreal being in the midst of the machine that is a U2 production for half an hour. As well as it being broad daylight, the bare bones are all exposed. Because of where the stage was in Croke Park, the backdrop was a very unfinished looking Hill 16, so it really takes the magic of nightfall to see it in all its glory. The stage itself had a kind of Ewok village of dudes above us just kind of wandering around, having lunch it looked like, while we were on stage.”
How does one return to normality after a gig like that?
“Normality is relative. U2 probably do this several hundred times at the same tempo, the same temperature. It’s quite something.”
Well, if anything will sort your head out, it’s a four-in-the-morning feed.
“That’s exactly what I came home to actually! We stayed out for a while and drank their kindly donated champagne, it was my first night out probably since my son was born. I stumbled in at something-o’clock and was faced with a nappy. The great leveler!”