Bell X1 are a music group from Dublin, Ireland, known for their wide range of styles, powerful live performances, intelligent and witty lyrics and a dedication to touring. NPR says they deliver "a brilliant co-mingling of electronic music and anthemic pop rock".
Bell X1 are festival and arena headliners in their native Ireland and play to ever growing numbers on their regular North American and European tours. Aside from U2, they are the Irish band with the most airplay in their native country and, according to Billboard, also the second biggest live performers.
Most of the band were originally members of Juniper. Paul Noonan was Juniper's drummer and Damien Rice was the lead vocalist; guitarists Dominic Philips and Brian Crosby and multi-instrumentalist David Geraghty completed the original line-up. Juniper built up a strong live following in Ireland and enjoyed chart success with EP Manna and singles Weatherman and World is Dead (the latter two through Universal Records) but never released a full album. The band became a quartet with the departure of Rice over creative differences. Rice admitted in a 2002 interview with the Sunday Tribune that he had become upset after writing a song which the record company had disliked.
The Bell X-1, designated originally as XS-1, was a joint National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics-U.S. Army Air Forces-U.S. Air Force supersonic research project built by the Bell Aircraft Company. Conceived during 1944 and designed and built during 1945, it achieved a speed of nearly 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km/h; 870 kn) during 1948. A derivative of this same design, the Bell X-1A, having greater fuel capacity and hence longer rocket burning time, exceeded 1,600 miles per hour (2,600 km/h; 1,400 kn) during 1954. The X-1 was the first manned airplane to exceed the speed of sound in level flight and was the first of the so-called X-planes, a series of American experimental rocket planes designated for testing of new technologies and often kept secret.
In 1942, the United Kingdom's Ministry of Aviation began a top secret project with Miles Aircraft to develop the world's first aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier. The project resulted in the development of the prototype turbojet-powered Miles M.52, designed to reach 1,000 miles per hour (870 kn; 1,600 km/h) (over twice the existing airspeed record) in level flight, and to climb to an altitude of 36,000 ft (11 km) in 1 min 30 sec.