“Absolutely,” he said.

A few minutes earlier I had walked through one of music’s most alluring portals, the backstage door. The door every fan imagines leads to a magical land of roadies and riders, where songs are born, and idols become humans.

And, if I’m being honest, as a lifelong fan of Bell X1, it’s a door I’ve spent years avoiding. Not because I wasn’t curious but because their songs had become so intertwined into the fabric of my life that I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to meet the men behind it.

Music does that.

Unlike films or books, songs seem to slip quietly into our psyche and attach themselves to moments before we realise it. A particular lyric becomes an inside joke between friends. An album becomes the soundtrack to a relationship. A song becomes woven so tightly into the memory of a person that one opening note can summon them back into the room.

Bell X1 have been doing that to Irish audiences for almost 30 years. For all the cleverness of Bell X1’s lyrics (and there is plenty of that), what keeps people returning is the emotional honesty beneath them.

The songs have always balanced humour and heartbreak with remarkable dexterity.

Much later that evening beneath the big top I would feel shivers down my spine during a collective experience with several thousand people who enthusiastically bellowed in unison the great theological question: “If there is a God, then why is my arse the perfect height for kicking?” But that is jumping ahead, and to get to that point I must rewind the clock back seven hours.

Sat across from my heroes

I am sitting opposite my heroes, Paul Noonan, David Geraghty, and Dominic Phillips in a temporary portable building behind Cork’s Live at the Marquee as the trio prepare to take to the stage together with drummer Tim O’Donovan and multi-instrumentalist Cormac Curran.

“Absolutely,” says Paul, pulling me out of my reverie. “I think a show day always has a lovely build to it. You get up, you hit the road, stop for coffee knowing it’s a show day. There are butterflies, definitely, kicking around. Then there’s the load-in, the chats, the soundcheck, dinner, and suddenly it’s 30 minutes, 15 minutes, five minutes. The opening bars, you hear the crowd and you kind of go, “There it is’.”

“Wow,” chimes in David, “actually I wanted to ask you guys about that because I was getting butterflies too and wondered if I was the only one actually still physically affected by the anticipation.”

And so the conversation began and I found myself relaxing into it almost immediately. There was an easy mellow warmth between them, the sort that comes from years spent sharing touring vans. They seemed far more interested in chatting than being interviewed, which is fortunate, as I am considerably better at talking than asking questions.

Emboldened by this I confessed that I hadn’t really wanted to meet them and the conversation drifted towards awkward encounters.

Awkward encounters

Paul recalled meeting one of his own musical idols, PJ Harvey, and having worked up the courage to approach her he found himself standing in front of her holding a plate of biscuits.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he admitted. “I just offered her a biscuit.” Harvey selected a pink wafer, thanked him politely and that, apparently, was that.

If the encounter lacked the profundity he might have hoped for, it also perfectly captured the awkward reality of meeting people whose work has meant something to you for years. What exactly are you meant to say once you are standing in front of them?

David Geraghty offered up his own answer. As a teenager he had been mesmerised by Phil Lynott, particularly the early Thin Lizzy records, long before the twin guitars and stadium-sized fame. Unlike me, however, David reckoned he would happily have met him.

“I think he was one of the sound ones,” he says with a grin.

Dominic was less certain. His instincts were that the best encounters happen when nobody realises they are having one.

“We played in Union Chapel one time,” he recalled. “I was out after the show and ended up chatting to these people and they told me they had been at a great gig by Bell X1 that evening and asked if I’d been at it.” The room dissolved into laughter. As it subsided, Paul, in his softly spoken and thoughtful manner, shared another story.

Years earlier he had found himself standing beside the writer John McGahern at an airport carousel. McGahern, already unwell, was travelling with his wife and Paul decided not to interrupt him.

“I just left the man alone,” he recalled.

Looking back now, though, he wonders if he might have made the wrong choice: “Part of me thinks he might have liked the idea of being an inspiration for a young writer of music.”

The meaning of music

It struck me that this was really the other side of the same conversation. Fans worry about bothering the people whose work matters to them. The people who create the work don’t know it matters unless they are bothered.

And Bell X1 are most certainly bothered; they know there would have been no music, no journey without their fans.

I decided this was as good a moment as any to share my own anecdote with them.

For personal reasons, Little Sister, a song by Juniper — the group from which Bell X1 emerged after Damien Rice’s departure in 1999 — had become something I couldn’t listen to. For years it carried too much emotional weight. But in preparing for this meeting, I found myself returning to it for the first time in almost a quarter of a century.

I told them of the bittersweet beauty in hearing it again and how it had reunited me with treasured moments of my own life.

All three listened carefully before responding.

It’s such a privilege to be able to do that, We got into this because we wanted to make music, but then you realise this whole other weight and power that comes with it. Which wasn’t the incentive but it’s a really beautiful surprise.

What has kept Bell X1 together for so long?

What struck me throughout our conversation was that Bell X1 are still animated by the very thing that first brought them together, the joy of making music.

That might sound obvious, but it is no small achievement for a band approaching three decades together. Few survive so long and fewer still continue to evolve.

At this point in their career, it would be very easy for Bell X1 to rest on their laurels and become what the music industry politely calls a ‘heritage act’, touring endlessly on nostalgia and old favourites while new work quietly gathers dust.

Bell X1 seem remarkably uninterested in that path. Their last album, Merciful Hour, released in 2023, was hailed as the strongest work of their career, shaped in part by the cancer struggle of their friend and collaborator Glenn Keating.

The experience inevitably found its way into the music. “You try to give voice to your experience as a person,” Paul said. “This was a very real thing that happened on that journey with Glenn and his illness, and seeing how gracefully he dealt with it and continued to be his brilliant self. That was a very moving thing to behold.”

Sadly Glenn passed away in March of this year. Within weeks the band returned to the recording studios to create their ninth album, Good Bones, which will be released later this year.

I asked if it had been difficult recording in a time of such heightened emotions. “It was therapeutic,” Paul admitted, saying the process was cathartic and healing.

“We recorded in a very organic way, all playing together.”

That sense of connection runs through the band itself. For all the mythology and rumours that fans often project onto long-standing groups, there were no visible tensions and no carefully curated rock star personas.

Instead they were just a gang of old friends.

They live separate lives, as they should, but they also share a lifetime of experiences and an unwavering passion for music which has forged a forever bond.

Showtime

A few minutes later they were called for the soundcheck. Watching them head towards the stage together, it was obvious the excitement had not disappeared. There were hugs and high-fives, family members appeared and selfies were snapped. After they left I lingered backstage for a while, still convinced there must be some secrets left to uncover. Alas, instead of unicorns I found only cables and puddles. It didn’t take me long to realise that despite my all-access pass there was really only one place I wanted to be.

Out front.

I spent a contented few hours chatting to fans as they streamed through the gates. Some had been following Bell X1 since the release of Pinball Machine, while others looked like they weren’t old enough to know what a pinball machine was.

I met more than one couple with a child named Eve, and one teenager told me that the band’s newest single But First, Love was already his favourite song.

What was universally agreed, however, was that Bell X1 remained as relevant to them now as they had ever been and there was certainly an appetite for another 30 years of music.

As the lights dimmed and the band took the stage, Glenn Keating’s presence remained close.

His image appeared on the giant screens.

The grief the band had spoken about was still there but so too was the passion and love that was carrying them through it.

As the concert reached its closing moments and thousands of voices rose together beneath the canvas roof of the Marquee, I found myself thinking back to that backstage door that had seemed so mysterious only a few hours earlier.

I had arrived wondering if there was magic behind it.

There wasn’t. The magic had been where it had always been.

In the songs, in the crowd, in the shared memories they carried, and in that extraordinary moment when several thousand strangers briefly become part of the same story.

• Bell X1 play Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens on July 11 and Galway International Arts Festival on July 25. Their ninth studio album, Good Bones, arrives later this year