Will talks to Salford Poptones veterans, The Montgolfier Brothers about The World Is Flat and their ‘lucrative friend’ , Alan McGee. Interview by Will Jenkins.
27/08/2002
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