The name says it all. Ballon D’essai or a “balloon trial”, which is a fancy French way of saying “floating an idea”. This is exactly what happened back in 1980 in Christchurch with a young band. Ballon D’essai were a beginner band of arty schoolboys taking up the music thing to see how it would fly and to where.
Graeme Downes seized the limitations of the three-piece, The Verlaines, and turned it all on its head. Wilfully complex - and at times awkward - this was music that Graeme Downes had the talent to create and the determination to make work. It started here with the release of ‘Death and the Maiden’.
The band were back with Flying Nun and no one there knew what was coming, apart from a few good but vague words from people in the know. When Skeptics III arrived back from the pressing plant, everyone knew from the opening bars of 'Affco' that this immense musical noise was something special.
"'Needles and Plastic' is a step up for Shayne Carter’s song writing. It has that persistent and relentless kind of drive that hypnotises and propels the listener all at the same time. John Collie's drumming has become fully integrated into the band's sound. The work on arrangements suggests increased maturity and ambition musically...."
While it was easy to dismiss The Stones as rough and ready, they were a musical venture serious about developing their own style distinct from their Dunedin contemporaries. They had big musical ideas that didn't need too many details, they had the big personalities to make it work. And despite everything they had a strange kind of hypnotic star power.
"I first met Doug at an Enemy gig at the Old Beneficiaries Hall in Dunedin in 1978. Chris Knox abused me for wearing a skinny tie (I still have it, but that was the last time I wore it), but I felt his friend Doug, who was the singer in the support band, The Clean, was committing a far greater sartorially sin that evening by wearing a stripped, “Oxbridge” style blazer."
Soon after telling a few friends that I was going to start up a record label, Roy Montgomery of The Pin Group approached me about releasing a single he planned to record. The Pin Group fitted the idea perfectly as they were a key band in our local Christchurch indie music scene that loosely orbited around the music venue that was - The Gladstone Hotel.
"The sophisticated sound is an ever shifting blend of gentle musical layers that flow and drift across each other in the most satisfying of ways. Tasteful, full of character and always assured."