Paul Noonan and Brian Crosby: "We almost have our own language together"

Paul Noonan and Brian Crosby go way back.

All the way back to Salesian College in Celbridge, Co. Kildare, in fact. There, alongside Damien Rice, they formed indie rock band Juniper in 1991. After releasing a couple of well-received EPs, Rice left towards the end of the decade, ultimately pursuing an incredibly successful solo career.

The remaining members would go on to form platinum-selling outfit Bell X1, who Crosby himself left in 2008 to follow his own pursuits as a composer, with his CV now gleaming with a variety of TV & film credits.

“I was getting really into film scoring at the time,” Crosby says. “I was balancing both worlds for a while. I found the commitment of touring kind of difficult to juggle with that and I wanted to try something new.

“I’ve never really spoken about this actually, but it’s funny being in a band. From the outside looking in, it feels quite bustly, but there’s an awful lot of sitting on your hole, on a sofa or on a bus, or in the back of a studio and I never rubbed with that.”

Sixteen years later, Noonan and Crosby – both fervent collaborators in their own right – have rekindled their creative partnership, a reunion that has brought with it a strong sense of nostalgia.

“We were in our first band together,” Noonan reflects. “There’s something very intense and formative about that: falling in love with music together, discovering music that we loved and then getting to make it. I think it’s all downhill from there in some ways. There’s a purity and fire there when you first start making music, and we were both going through that together.”

“Music is such a great vehicle to hang out with people too,” Crosby adds. “In many ways, the reason this has aligned is because we’re both so busy and realise that we’ve got this really strong friendship, but actually don’t get to hang out so much anymore. There’s this mutual respect as artists as well, which brought us back and all made sense.

“We haven’t just worked with each other, we’ve lived with each other as well. Myself and Paul almost have our own language together. We’ve developed this way of double guessing each other in a strange way.
“I’ve been a big fan of Bell X1 since I’ve left, strange as that sounds. It’s been really interesting having some time apart and we’ve both had personal and musical journeys since; there’s a mutual respect for what we’ve both done. I personally can get a little bit stuck in a vacuum sometimes, so being able to collaborate with somebody really invigorates the whole art and conversation around it.”

Bell X1

Their reconnection has resulted in the release of an evocative new track, ‘My Bones A Scaffold’. Originally an instrumental piano piece on Crosby’s solo debut Imbrium, the song inspired Noonan to add lyrics, sparking a unique musical dialogue between the two.

“Brian’s solo record was the first, or most substantial piece of work that he put out on his own since leaving the band,” Noonan explains. “I was really moved by it. I kept hearing vocals and other things going on, and so I actually committed to one of the songs, wrote lyrics and juggled the arrangement a little bit. Then we fashioned it into a song, which was a different beast from what we both had done. We did it for its own sake really, to reconnect creatively. Brian sees music as quite different, or at least we approach the making of music quite differently.

“He leans into the scoring and atmospheric instrumental side of things, where he’s responding to images with complex layered interpretations. I think I’m a much less accomplished musician with a more basic understanding of music theory. By responding with a story and words to his music, we’ve both linked our strengths. It’s something we’d love to continue doing and make a record, or some a bigger body of work.”

The conversation did not stop there. The track, with its suspended, aquatic feel, called out for a visual dimension. Noonan reached out to acclaimed skate culture and music photographer Rich Gilligan (whose work has been published in publications such as iD, The New York Times, NME, Q and Vogue). What emerged was an unexpected resonance for the photographer at a difficult time in his life, after losing a friend at sea. The resulting video is hypnotic and claustrophobic, with much of that down to the clip being innovatively shot inside a carwash.

“I’ve worked with Rich Gilligan a lot over the years, and he has a particularly beautiful eye for capturing the skate and music world,” Noonan says. “He’s always thinking outside the box in terms of what band portraits are, and he thinks quite deeply about connecting what he does to a specific record. I’ve long thought that he could make some beautiful videos. He hasn’t done a whole lot of that work, but I really would love to see him in that space. It feels really satisfying to have truly collaborated in a sort of multimedia way with Rich on the video. He’s really put his heart into it as well.”

The whole experience, Noonan reflects, has been deeply moving, helping him return to a meditative connection with music.

“I’ve been living with Brian’s record for those few months,” he says. “It was one of those records that brought me to when I used to buy REM, Stone Roses or early Radiohead records, stick on headphones and lie there in the dark to become completely immersed. I would never listen to music like that anymore – it was such a beautiful and immersive experience. With ‘My Bones A Scaffold’, I did have this idea of an underwater journey, an escape of sorts, and I just leaned into that. Music is about connecting with the metaphysical. It’s about stepping outside the everyday corporeal experience and connecting with something magical.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising, judging by his words, that Noonan has been supplementing his career as an artist with a relatively newfound passion for psychology by working as a music therapist.

“As Brian said, you’d spend a lot of time sitting in your hole,” he says. “I just got really interested in the neurology of music and what’s going on in there. I was reading about a guy called Oliver Sachs who wrote a book called Musicophilia, which talks about people living with brain injury and how music triggers their rehab. I was drawn by using music to help people in various settings away from the traditional audience and performer dynamic.

“I would work with kids with autism, and that work would be around language development and emotional sensory regulation. Then there’s kids who may have had a lot of difficulty at home. Music is kind of secondary there. It’s about establishing a positive relationship with an adult – being that stable presence in their life as much as you can for an hour a week.”

• ‘My Bones A Scaffold’ is out now: