In early 1998, musician and songwriter Mark Tranmer built a makeshift set-up for recording his song ideas at home.

“I was living above a flower shop in Southampton,” Tranmer recalls. “A rented flat on a street corner.” There, he recorded various instrumental demos for songs on DAT, sending them on to his new collaborator Roger Quigley in Salford who would add melody lines and lyrics. One of Tranmer’s demos started life with the working title Soft Loop. Quigley dubbed it Red House Painters because something about it reminded him of the American band of the same name.

Once completed, though, the song was officially titled Between Two Points. The subsequent story of the song, and Tranmer and Quigley’s band The Montgolfier Brothers, is genuinely remarkable.

‘Laugh through the punches and the pain’

In the late 1990s, Tranmer was well established as a musician, briefly as a member of indie darlings St Christopher, and subsequently as a solo instrumental act recording under the banner GNAC. Meanwhile, having studied fine art at Sunderland University (and collected glasses at Manchester’s Haçienda), Quigley had ambitions to become an artist, but found himself working as a singer/songwriter, releasing albums under the name Quigley on the Vespertine label, run by his childhood friend Richard O’Brien (not, needless to say, the Rocky Horror Show creator). As it happens, O’Brien knew Tranmer too, and Vespertine had released material by Tranmer’s GNAC project. As such, Quigley and Tranmer found themselves in the same orbit and swiftly developed a mutual admiration.

“I moved north to Salford in autumn 1998, and I said to Roger if he ever needed some second guitar for his gigs I would be happy to help out,” Tranmer says. “We played a few in the Manchester area. Also, around this time, there was interest in Roger’s work from France, specifically in Tours, and so he was preparing an album for the Tours-based label Acetone, and playing live in Tours. Somewhere around then, we decided on a side project where I would supply musical ideas and Roger would contribute the words and vocals. We decided to call our side project The Montgolfier Brothers.”

Naturally enough, the band’s first album, Seventeen Stars, was set to be released on Vespertine by O’Brien.

“Mark had been working for a while on the music for the first album, and early demos sounded promising,” O’Brien says. “Roger’s lyrics and vocals took the songs to a different level and it was obvious at that stage that they had struck gold as a songwriting partnership. Between Two Points was clearly a highlight on the first record, but I still maintain that the album’s title track is even better.”

No one in the band was minded to jack in their day job just yet. Tranmer had secured a post at the University of Manchester, lecturing in statistics and maths, while Quigley was working as a exhibitions invigilator and technician at Cornerhouse art centre in Manchester. There, Quigley befriended a like-minded colleague, Otto Smart, who was also writing and recording his own music. Before long, Smart was sharing gigs with The Montgolfier Brothers. They’d back him when he played his songs, he’d provide glockenspiel when they played theirs. After a gig at the Castlefield Gallery in late 1998, Smart was officially invited to join the band as guitarist. “I didn’t really need to think about it,” he recalls. “I remember Roger saying ‘enjoy the ride’. And I did.”

Smart was ideally positioned to observe the developing working relationship between Tranmer and Quigley.

“I just think the combination of Mark’s music and Roger’s lyrics really worked,” he says. “They were very different characters. They got along really well, but you couldn’t get more different people, really. Mark was academic and very classical in his approach, and Roger was sort of the opposite. Roger was always all about words, Mark was always about music.”

But “they were great times,” according to O’Brien. “The emphasis was firmly on the art and the fun we could derive from it, never on the balance sheet.” Vespertine released the Seventeen Stars album in spring 1999, and though it didn’t sell it huge numbers, it accrued some heavy duty admirers, including music critics Pete Paphides and Bob Stanley.

Another was Alan McGee, who had recently led Oasis to colossal success via his record label, Creation. In fact, McGee was then in the process of winding down Creation and launching a new, more grass-roots label called Poptones. He promptly signed The Montgolfier Brothers and, in September 2000, a reissue of Seventeen Stars became the new label’s first release (in his subsequent memoir Creation Stories, McGee called the album ‘a baroque, cinematic classic that almost no one has ever heard’).

Sure enough, though they were hotly feted for a time (not least by McGee), the barrage of critical acclaim the band generated never translated into sales. Perhaps that’s only to be expected: their highly idiosyncratic style, drawing on a mutual love of Durutti Column and The Smiths, wasn’t designed to trouble the charts. Take Between Two Points as an example. Musically it’s lush, gentle and evocative, the main refrain running through it not unlike a child’s wind-up toy forever on the brink of stopping altogether, coupled with Quigley’s fragile vocal and heartbroken, defeated lyrics.

‘Just let them walk all over you

Laugh through the punches and the pain

Let the life-blood drain away from you

They’re right, you’re wrong’

It’s quite beautiful, albeit the sort of dark, melancholy beauty that feels as though it might suck you in and envelop you entirely if you let it.

Around the world

Nevertheless, The Montgolfier Brothers found themselves in the orbit of music luminaries. McGee oversaw a regular night at Notting Hill Arts Club, where the band performed to audiences including the likes of Kate Moss, Kevin Rowland, Bobby Gillespie, and the Gallagher brothers. “It was the place to be for a while,” Smart says. “I remember Konnie Huq was there at one point. My niece was very impressed, because she was a big Blue Peter fan.”

This attention never translated into broader UK success for the band, though there were parts of the world where The Montgolfier Brothers became a pretty big deal, not least France and Spain.

“There was a memorable early show at a festival in Vendôme and another a few years later in Barcelona, both in front of much bigger audiences than the band were used to in Britain,” O’Brien remembers.

Smart adds: “Spain was the one place where we sort of made it, I suppose. In Barcelona – somewhere in Spain, anyway – I remember walking down the street, and some girls came along and recognised Roger. They were like, ‘Roger! Roger Quigley!’ We were completely chuffed, because it was quite early on, and we thought, how do they know us? We’d obviously reached some level of really minor indie fame.”

“Post-Poptones, there was initially distribution confusion in France, which lost us some momentum there,” says Tranmer. “At the same time, through Poptones, we got better known in the UK beyond Manchester, and also in other European countries, as well as in Japan, where Epic-Sony-Japan released our first two albums. Our first album, Seventeen Stars, was also released in Brazil on a label there called Trama.”

McGee marshalled the band to play some shows in Japan, though overall his commitment to the project appeared to be waning. “He still loved the music, but I think he’d lost faith in the label and the idea that we could actually make it as a famous band, as a going concern,” Smart says. “He just thought, ‘it’s not going to happen. It’s great music, but for some reason not enough people will actually want it’. He took us to Tokyo, he did a DJ set and we played at the opening the Virgin Megastore. It was a great experience, but I remember McGee saying goodbye at the airport. He hugged us all, as if to say, ‘it’s been great knowing you but that’s it’. And that kind of was it, sadly.”

Poptones released the second Montgolfier Brothers album, The World is Flat, in 2002, but their third album, All My Bad Thoughts, emerged on O’Brien’s new Vespertine & Son label in 2005. There were other joint projects, including sessions for a fourth album that was never completed or released. The band appeared to have lost momentum.

Thereafter they continued to collaborate in various combinations, but often under different guises. Quigley – whose actor brother Pearce has become familiar through TV shows including Detectorists – released solo albums, credited to At Swim Two Birds, via Vespertine & Son. On May 15, 2014, The Montgolfier Brothers, by then augmented by Sophia Lockwood on cello, played a one final gig in the reading room of Manchester’s Central Library.

Quigley had continued to work as a maintenance manager at Cornerhouse, carrying across when the venue merged with the Library Theatre to become HOME. On August 18, 2020, he was working on a gallery changeover at HOME when his colleagues realised he hadn’t been seen for a while. When they found him, they discovered he’d collapsed and died of a heart attack without warning. He was 51.

A lasting legacy

It would have been tragic for The Montgolfier Brothers’ story to have ended on this note but, as it happens, it’s had an extraordinary post-script. September 2024 saw the release of Luck and Strange, the fifth solo album by Pink Floyd singer/guitarist David Gilmour. It was a family affair, with most of the lyrics provided by his wife Polly Samson, and their children Gabriel and Romany contributing backing vocals.

One track, though, was a cover version – namely of The Montgolfier Brothers’ Between Two Points. (“I received an email in my University of Glasgow inbox from David’s manager in February 2024,” Tranmer says. “At first, I didn’t believe it was really from him.”) In interviews to promote the album, Gilmour talked of having known and admired the song since it was first released, and being surprised to learn that it wasn’t better known. On deciding to record his own version, he’d been quick to accept that his voice wasn’t right for it. Instead, he asked his daughter Romany to take a shot it.

The result has become a runaway success, one of Gilmour’s most acclaimed solo recordings, with more than ten million streams on Spotify and ten million views on YouTube for a ‘tour rehearsal’ video, plus another five million views each for the main video and a live performance on the BBC’s Later… The official video for the song was shot at locations including the bridge over the River Irwell and The Kings Arms pub in Salford, as suggested by Tranmer, Smart and O’Brien when they were approached for ideas of places that had special meaning to the late Quigley.

Social media is now awash with DIY cover versions and ‘reaction’ videos, wherein people film themselves hearing the song for the first time. It’s a genuine phenomenon that shows no sign of stopping, gradually propelling the song to the status of a new Manchester classic.

In the slipstream of the song’s success, a new Montgolfier Brothers compilation, Think Once More, was released by Pete Paphides’ label Needle Mythology earlier this year.

“It’s funny,” O’Brien says. “Roger revelled in the underdog role and had little ambition for fame or fortune, so it’s not difficult to imagine him chuckling away at the sudden upsurge in recognition, nearly three decades after the first records came out. But The Montgolfier Brothers’ music fully deserves the attention it’s now getting, so there’s definitely a sense that the success is long overdue.”

Tranmer feels that it is “amazing that the song has survived all these years and found new audiences through Romany and David’s cover. Some people are thus finding out the original, about the band, and about all our other songs. But bittersweet, of course, that Roger Quigley is not here to share this.”

As for his abiding memories of Quigley, Tranmer says: “He was strong minded and a true artist, whose work lives on. It was a real pleasure to have worked with him.”

O’Brien adds: “He had a quiet charisma and touched many people’s lives with his wit and the generosity of his spirit. We’re lucky to have known him.”

By Andy Murray, Music Editor

Main image: credit Oliver de Banes

Between Two Points – the original Montgolfier Brothers’ version:

Between Two Points – cover version by David Gilmour with Romany Gilmour: see it here.

The compilation Think Once More: A Journey with The Montgolfier Brothers is available via Needle Mythology here.