Gig of the Week: Bell X1, still ringing the changes

The band are celebrating 20 years with a sold-out residency at Vicar Street, in Dublin

Bell X1: five nights, five different shows

Sat Mar 17 2018 - 05:00

We would wager a hefty bet that when Bell X1 formed in 1997 (out of the ashes of a band called Juniper, which had in its ranks singer and songwriter Damien Rice), not even their most faithful fan, let alone the band members, would have thought they’d still be around 20 years later.

And yet, as the band’s website would have it, an awful lot of things (and some awful things, too) can occur over a 20 year period. “Economies can collapse and rebuild. Lovers can lock eyes, walk down aisles and drop children to school gates. Under our noses tastes undergo changes we may never understand, and cherished silver can earn its tarnishing.” Too true.

From next Wednesday, Bell X1 (Paul Noonan, Dave Geraghty, Dominic Philips) perform five consecutive nights at Dublin's Vicar St, but this isn't any old residency – this is band not only celebrating 20 years as a cohesive unit but also admitting that you can chop and change as the years pass and still retain creative copyrights and crucial levels of integrity.

Veracity might be an abstract notion for some, but what is fact is there hasn’t ever been an Irish rock band with such a protracted level of style, substance, and smarts as Bell X1. Because they can, because they want to, because they have to, the band experiment with the form.

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Ambition plays a part, of course, but occasionally their chameleonic nature makes it difficult for the fan base (and radio playlist programmers) to focus. Not that any group, let alone Bell X1, should care too much about this. Depending on whatever takes their fancy at the time, their music can be different shades. It can evolve for one album (Noonan has said that 2013's Chop Chop used "robust filters over intense bursts") and then flip it for the next (2016's Arms "meanders more, we didn't necessarily want filter").

In perhaps the most important way, such an approach has made it difficult to market the band in certain territories. Not being easy to pigeonhole can certainly have its creative advantages, but when it comes to supporting a core group of three adults with associated responsibilities it helps if there’s a financially rewarding marketing plan or two. It’s fair to say that a five-night residency at Vicar St was certainly a good idea.

One of the many interesting aspects of Bell X1 is that its most recognisable members (Paul Noonan and Dave Geraghty) have worked on successful sidebar work. Noonan’s external projects include Printer Clips, and artistic supervisory work for the National Concert Hall (in 2016 as the co-creative producer for Allianz Business to Arts award winner Starboard Home, and most recently as co-curator of Imagining Ireland, a resounding success in Dublin’s NCH and London’s Barbican). Geraghty’s work outside Bell X1 includes Join Me in the Pines (three albums, and one on the way) as well as acclaimed soundtrack work for film and television (including the Oscar-nominated short The Big Crush, and the feature You’re Ugly Too). Tangents have been taken, new music has been written, creative muscles have been flexed with and flagrantly displayed to other people. Inevitably, risk has followed in their wake, but ultimately everything feeds back into the belly of the beast that is Bell X1.