A View Of The World From The Stormy Little Rock

Paul Noonan's soft Irish lilt crackles over the phone, surprisingly chipper considering it's 10pm his time. "We're kinda coming into winter time. Not only are we at opposite ends of the day, we're experiencing different seasons too," he shivers. Among Ireland's biggest exports, Bell X1 are proud to represent their "little rock" on the global stage. "We're a tiny little country that sort of sends a lot of people around the world... In the '80s Ireland was pretty poor, grim, repressed. I think we've come a long way in our identity. For such a small country we probably do punch above our weight," he laughs. 

Known for their eclectic commingling of genres and style, the band's 16-year career has driven them through the ups and downs of seven albums, culminating in their 2016 release, Arms. "This was probably the most difficult record we've made. Because the last one [2013's Chop Chop] was so easy I think we were probably due for a real difficult seventh album syndrome that went along for a couple of years," he chuckles. "The band has always jumped around stylistically and we're very hard to pin down. We don't do that to be awkward, it's just we love a lot of kinds of music and I suppose it's how we roll. But we're a hard act to sell, I can see that!"

"When stuff goes to shit for the main characters they go, 'Fuck it! Let's just go bowling.'"

After 2000's debut release Neither Am I — produced by Crowded House bass player Nick Seymour — the band steadily gathered a loyal live following "playing a couple of hundred shows a year". By the time their second record Music In Mouth was released in 2003 they had signed with Island Records UK, but severed the partnership in early 2007. "At the time we were very frustrated, we felt [Island] didn’t really give a shit about outside of Ireland and the UK. We felt like we were chomping at the bit to get to America for quite a while, and being on a big label we needed to sell a lot more records in Ireland and the UK before they would take that a lot more seriously. We didn’t want to be part of a big machine anymore," he explains of the decision. They formed their own independent label — BellyUp Records — and have toured the States relentlessly ever since. 2009's release of Blue Lights On The Runway saw the first incarnation of the live band as a three-piece following the departure of guitarist Brian Crosby in October 2008, playing his final show with the group at Lebanon's Panorama Festival (the Flock tour finale).

Arms is gentler than Bell X1's prior records — elegantly melancholy, reflecting the determination, optimism and bittersweet musings of a band finding wisdom in the next stages of their lives and careers. Noonan cites The Big Lebowski ("When stuff goes to shit for the main characters they go, 'Fuck it! Let's just go bowling'") and contemplates "the notion that life is some of the good luck and the bad luck that we encounter and there's nothing we can do about it". In tracks like Arms opener Fail Again, Fail Better Arms, this manifesto is embraced, giving the album a "crazy unhinged feel". "Thematically, the notion of Arms comes from a few things. The main one, I think, is sort of: as the world feels like it's becoming a harsher, scarier, less compassionate place we need to feel the embrace of those around us and to offer that embrace. That sounds maybe like a little twee thing to say, but given what happened a couple of days ago it feels all the more so," he explains during our conversation, which took place mere days after the election of Trump.

"You'd hope the pendulum would swing back in four years' time or it wont be as bad as we think it's going to be or there will be some mitigating forces in there, but it's so fuckin' dark," he urges. "We tour a lot in the States and I guess by virtue of it all we meet people who would vote for Trump, get a feel of that anger and resentment and racist white supremacy that seems to drive a lot of that… [Arms track] Sons & Daughters in some ways speaks to our worst nightmares, or at least the things that we share - how fucked the world is and what we're leaving our children.

"To counter what I've just said, statistically people have never had it so good — we live longer, we have more comfortable lives, terrorism was actually more so in the '80s than it is now, but the world has moved on and the amount of information and stimulus we get; there's just so much noise now and we feel quite oppressed like that — I certainly do. The amount of conflicting information that seems to be flying around, it's very unsettling, there's a modern — the mood is one of unease, I feel."