IRISH indie rock band Bell X1 will make their long awaited return to the INEC on Saturday, December 5. Their latest best-selling album, Blue Lights on The Runway, features the hit song, ‘The Great Defector’, which has proved to be the bands most successful single yet while the album itself has been critically acclaimed as Bell X1 at their best.
Having made music together in various guises since the early 90s, Kildare school friends Paul Noonan, Dave Geraghty, Dominic Phillips and Brian Crosby (who recently departed the band to pursue his passion for production work and writing soundtracks) communed under the name Bell X1 to release their debut album for Polydor Records, Neither Am I, in 2000. Three years of touring and writing, and a label move to Island Records, brought its successor, Music In Mouth, and the beginning of the band’s inexorable rise in Ireland.
In 2005 the band released their third album, Flock, which exploded in Ireland with multi-platinum sales and sold out shows in the country’s biggest venues. At the beginning of 2007 the band parted company with Island/Universal and, that summer, went it alone with a highly successful Live CD / DVD package, Tour De Flock, on their own label, BellyUp Records, which captured them at a pivotal point in their career.
The next twelve months centred on the band setting out their stall internationally. They secured a North American deal with the Yep Roc label and, with their customarily emboldened live band, squeezed in four tours of the US, picking up key TV slots on everything from The Letterman Show and Conan O’Brien to Craig Ferguson and the CW1 Morning Show as well as having their music used on Grey’s Anatomy and One Tree Hill.
