Flying below the radar
The Montgolfier Brothers
THOUGH David Gilmour has no clear memory of hearing The Montgolfier Brothers for the first time, it isn’t hard to discern the qualities in their music that would have appealed to his sensibilities. On “Journey’s End”, taken from their 2005 album All My Bad Thoughts, Roger Quigley sings, “You can’t stop time, hard as you might try/we’re not here long, and then you’re gone” – sentiments echoed by many of Polly Samson’s lyrics for Luck And Strange. The outward reserve of Quigley’s vocals tempers a poetic worldview that mixes bathetic minutiae with the internal 3am discourses we manage to keep at bay the rest of the time. In another time and place, it would have been no great stretch to imagine them on the Harvest roster alongside the young Pink Floyd and other quintessentially British voices such as Kevin Ayers and Roy Harper – although the influence of early albums by Felt and fellow Mancunian Vini Reilly also extends over the Montgolfiers’ sonic tableau.
Prior to coming together as The Montgolfier Brothers, Quigley and instrumentalist Mark Tranmer also recorded separately – the former as Quigley (though later releases were as At Swim Two Birds); the latter as GNAC. After Seventeen Stars, Quigley and Tranmer recorded two more albums, finding an ardent fan in Alan Mcgee, who reissued that debut on his Poptones imprint, as well as its successor The World Is Flat. For both Quigley and Tranmer, music was something they fitted in around their day jobs, joined by live guitarist Otto Smart. Until his sudden death in 2020, Quigley had worked at Manchester’s cultural centre HOME, while Tranmer works as a Professor of Quantitative Social Sciences at Glasgow University, with GNAC still a going concern alongside Vetchinsky Settings, the duo he has formed with James Hackett from The Orchids. “When I got the initial email from David’s manager,” he recalls, “I was in the middle of marking essays. He’d searched for me and found my University email. I thought it was a joke. In fact, I’m still not 100 per cent sure it isn’t.”