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Salford is a city with a strong community spirit that
is inherently born out of the strong partisanship of
Manchester. As one of the first active industrial cities
in the world, the area has always considered itself
to be a place with a modern outlook merely because of
the enormous changes that have altered the countryside
over the past 200 years. Therefore it is no surprise
that as Salford was at the forefront of the industrial
revolution, with its advancement in textiles, among
major industries, such progress has left a mark of fierce
pride on that City.
A sense of enterprise fuels many a venture and although
as an informed industrial hub it may seem pseud to see
this attitude as an inspiration for the music that has
emerged from the City and the Manchester Metropolitan
area. It is not at all in the subsequent pride and trumpeting
by the city’s inhabitants of groups like Oasis, New
Order and Happy Mondays as only from this area and this
area alone.
The Montgolfier Brothers, Roger Quigley and Mark Tranmer,
may not espouse the rapacious underpinnings of the Manchester
groups mentioned, yet their beginnings show a debt more
to the ingenuity of the area than downing pints in Burnage.
“The biggest financial help in starting The Montgolfier
Brothers was through our friend Richard O’ Brien, who
runs the Vespertine label,” says Roger. “He was a racing
journalist for a while and he made some money through
tips and with that he set up the record company.”
“He was a fan of St Christopher, which Mark was in while
he was doing his own material, and while myself and
Mark liked the cut of each other’s gib and he helped
me out on a mini-tour of France, when we returned Richard,
with the money made on the horses, helped to release
Seventeen Stars.”
The group, apart from Richard’s investiture, formed
in 1997 after instrumentalist Mark joined vocalist and
songwriter Roger for a tour of France in a revamped
electricity van. Gnac, the project that Mark was working
on, presented his new partner with ten instrumental
tracks who then added words and vocals to six of them.
Following a series of arm wrestles on the mixing desk,
an album, Seventeen Stars, was completed, containing
the six vocal tracks and four instrumentals. What the
venture produced was an album of poignant exegeses upon
relationships with a musical approach more redolent
of European film soundtracks, not the gloriously histrionic
Hollywood themes of the 1960s, more the work of Frenchman
Georges Delerue and Polish Jazz-Man Krzyzstof Komeda
and other New Wave talents. A juxtaposition of the intriguing
and deeply personal, scored to the tune of the rolling
waltz themes of Jules Et Jim and Cul De Sac.
“Mark comes up with the basics of the track,” Roger
explains. “On the first album he finished the music
all by himself and then I karaoked over the top. With
the new album he began to send me one demo at a time
and then I would crack open a bottle of red and see
what happened with the words. One of the advantages
over Seventeen Stars with The World Is Flat was that
we had bought two studio kits for each of us, so we
could define our sound. Where Mark wrote the basic background
a year ago we could then share between us the slight
tweaks needed to finish it off and that took another
six months.”
The World Is Flat – the new album – considers relationships
much in the same way the doyen of asexuality Morrissey
carried out when he was in The Smiths. Roger does not
try to conceal flora and fauna about his person or wear
a commiserating hearing aid, the songs however come
from an unidentified speaker in much the same way as
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and I Know It’s Over.
Apart from a choice mention of Roger’s favourite pub,
his local, The King’s Arms, the words that he sings
come more from every-mouth than just his own.
“They are (the songs) projections of relationships –
past, present, future. May be it is the miserable Irish
streak in me that quite a few of the songs could appear
bleak, but I do feel some of these emotions and I then
project fact on to fiction. I always dwell on the negative
things, out of a four year relationship I will always
hone in on the bad things and turn that in to an accumulative
effect.”
“The listener though in not knowing me is perfectly
free to print the sex on to the songs. Like the song
Inches Away which is about two people who haven’t met,
but in the course of the song go through an entire relationship
which finishes unfulfilled. Now some of the sentiments
expressed are my own directly from things I have gone
through, though the people in the song do not exist
and could be anyone.”
Favourable and an even more lucrative friend, Alan McGee,
erstwhile label entrepreneur, has bolstered Roger and
Mark’s self-sufficiency by signing the duo to Poptones.
Re-releasing Seventeen Stars as the label’s first ever
album. The pair has been allowed to work at their own
pace and produce what they are most comfortable with
and subsequently created an album that you should own.
There is no trade on misery for Roger; he sees his role
more as a supportive figure perhaps expressing the most
difficult parts of a relationship, which is conducted
in non-verbal gestures. He is not aggravated by accusations
of bed-sit romance, more he doesn’t want to be dismissed
in that way. “I don’t mind as such,” Roger considers
“We are quite blasé about the whole thing sometimes.
Overall it’s more important to get an email from Spain
from someone I’ve never met to say the music was helpful
than worry about opinions outside of that.”
The World Is Flat is out now on Poptones. 
Will Jenkins for Crud Magazine© 2002
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