Talented trio, Miracle Bell are determined to make musical mark

Up-and-coming electro-pop band Miracle Bell will open for The Coranas in the city’s Black Box, Dyke Road this Sunday, December 19. The band are Dave Prendergast (vocals/guitar/synth), John Broe (guitar/vocals/synth), and John Rigney (drums/vocals/samples).The band was started originally started by Dave and John Rigney, with John Broe joining the fray not long after.

“They started a cover band, honing their skills I suppose,” recalls John Broe. “Dave is my cousin. I said to him ‘I play piano if you want that. He said ‘I’d love it’ – and I ended up playing guitar in the band!

“We only became a real band two years ago, when we started writing our album in a huge house down in Monasterevin in Kildare,” he adds. “We released the album in May and we’ve been on the up since then.”The band found the ‘huge house’ through the popular website daft.ie. It afforded them the space and seclusion needed to write tracks for their debut album, Light Shape Sound.

“It was a six or seven-bedroom house,” recalls John. “It had two studios, one for our sound engineer and one for us. And a whole big rehearsal room as well. It was the best experience of my life, so far, but it got a little bit tough towards the end.”

The three lads, and their sound engineer Peter Lee, had hoped to oversee all aspects of the recording. As the process went on, though, they realised they needed an experienced hand to help them finish it.“We were having a tough time deciding on the best production so we got in Ciaran Bradshaw; he worked with Dark Room Notes and a good few other bands,”John says.

“We didn’t know what he would bring, but it was actually unbelievable. He completely polished the sound. Most of the synth sounds we had, you could say, sounded a bit amateur and he brought a whole new way to how it should sound. “

Bradshaw’s experience in the industry, and fresh ears, helped Miracle Bell to gel better in the studio.

“He had a really good way of making us work together and not take the heads off each other,” John says. “He had a big influence on the sound of the record – I had a few synth sounds that I really loved and he would shoot me down and say ‘it’s been done, forget it. Let’s try a different sound’.”

Some bands spend years working on their music, only to falter at the end when they try to tweak the album into perfection. But there was relief in the Miracle Bell camp when they released their debut in May.“We had pushed back the release about three times at that stage,” explains John. “We were hoping for a distribution deal, which we eventually got, with RMG. That pushed us back about three months because if we didn’t get it, there was no point releasing a physical album. You can’t get it into the shops.”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.