The Blue Nile Hats Adobe
Paul Buchanan, the elusive and self-deprecating frontman of Scottish pop group, once compared making records to falling in love. “You can’t do it every year,” he elaborated. Since forming in 1981, the Blue Nile have released only four albums, each one followed by a long period of silence. Their music is patient and understated. Their songs mostly explore the trajectory of relationships, from their glittery beginnings to their plateaus of contentment and their exhausted, haunted finales. Their stories are set in the smoky locales of noir: in ragtown, shantytown, tinseltown. It’s usually raining.
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To listen passively to the Blue Nile is to ride in a taxi through the city at night as familiar scenes blur outside your window. To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights.
By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks. The members of the Blue Nile met while they were students at the University of Glasgow.
After graduating and easing into an uninspiring teaching gig, Buchanan says he and his friends turned to music in search of a career that they “could be instinctive about.” With Buchanan on guitar and vocals, Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore on keyboards and synth, and Robert Bell on bass, they recruited a drum machine as their fourth member. The Blue Nile’s first single—1981’s “I Love This Life”—is a catchy song about an up-and-coming rock band doomed to remain a cult act. Dreaming of adoring crowds and hit records, Buchanan sings with appropriate joie de vivre, but even on his first single, he sounds more like a veteran actor portraying a teenager.
He has the type of pained, dignified voice, like or, that makes it hard to imagine him ever actually being young. “I know I’m going out of style,” he sings and immediately asks, “Am I already out of style?” The song, paired with a downbeat B-side called “The Second Act,” became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the band continued in relative obscurity. Their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, arrived in 1984 via the stereo equipment company Linn, who were looking to expand their reach by starting a label.
(“Linn weren’t a record company and we weren’t a band,” Buchanan would later reflect in Elliot J. Huntley and Edith Hall’s biography From a Late Night Train.) Still, their unusual working relationship allowed the members of the Blue Nile to record in Linn’s studios and operate without a strict deadline. As so often happens with our first brushes of love, the band chased this experience the rest of their career. No pressure and no expectations—a creative process they could be instinctive about.
Whittled down to seven songs, A Walk Across the Rooftops is a stately record that established the Blue Nile’s sound—a sprawling, sophisticated strain of ambient synth pop—and their major themes. “I am in love with a feeling,” Buchanan sings in “From Rags to Riches.” “Is there a place in this city/A place to always feel this way,” he asks in “Tinseltown in the Rain,” a minor hit in Holland and the closest thing the Blue Nile have to a signature song. The album, punctuated by Bell’s slap bass and a vibrant backdrop of keys and guitars, dazzled critics and established a small audience of devoted fans. Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “One of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling.
It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.” It was an omen. The five years between A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats were trying times for the band. Relationships, both romantic and professional, crumbled around them. An album’s worth of material was scrapped—the feeling just wasn’t there—and the tapes were burned.
Witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ decades-long marriage, Buchanan’s writing became increasingly sparse and tormented, like Raymond Carver stories stretched into the shape of torch ballads. At his mother’s house, Buchanan tracked a new song called “Christmas” that wouldn’t end up making the record. Its lyrics are a portrait of the least romantic kind of adult despair: money running out, children crying. But the song is a balm, smoother and sweeter than anything the band had ever recorded.
At one point, Buchanan plays an uncharacteristic guitar solo and hums along sadly. “Take it easy,” he sings as if to himself, “I still love you. I believe in you.” This is the tone of Hats: a series of hard-won love songs written like no one was in the room. Despite its long incubation, the music arrived fairly quickly once the band established its arc.
The song that opened the creative floodgates was “The Downtown Lights,” a rush of images and emotions that flows at the deliberate pace of a steady walk through snow. Buchanan’s guitar has hints of ’ palm-muted funk; Bell’s bass slides where it once popped. By the end of the song, Buchanan is bellowing and the band is locked into an airtight stride, accompanied by a string section woven so closely to the lyrics you might think they’re daydreaming it. Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis.
The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone. The magic of Hats is how the music makes defeat sound euphoric. Depending on your mood, Hats can be an uplifting album (“It’s all right” serves as its rallying cry) or a uniquely devastating one. These are multi-dimensional portraits: colorful cities populated by lonely people, romantic gestures received by silence, beautiful evenings going nowhere. The most immediate tracks on the album shift between moods like a plane dipping through clouds.
“Headlights on the Parade” rides its glowing new wave groove while Buchanan prods a lover that something isn’t right. “Over the Hillside” begins with a sad hospital pulse and his depictions of a long, sleepless night, but it transcends to feel like an invitation, like elegance—“” in a luxury car.
“Tomorrow I will be there,” he sings proudly at the end, “Oh, you wait and see.” On some listens, you believe him. The Blue Nile are a band whose criticisms only draw fans closer. Sure, all their songs are about love. Yes, they have erred on the side of adult contemporary. It’s true that, in the ’90s, and sang Buchanan’s words as comfortably as their own.
But just as became a symbol for the fame-averse underdog ideals of ’90s indie rock, the Blue Nile have proven newly influential. You can hear their heavenly chill on recent albums by; their lowercase romance in; their intense intimacy in. When Buchanan joined to co-write a track on last year’s, it became clear how his band’s work had been reflected in pop music’s patient, moody turns. While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including, and, to this day nothing sounds quite like Hats. The Blue Nile themselves never quite replicated it, opting for a loose, soulful atmosphere on 1996’s Peace At Last and a more sober approach for 2004’s High. Its closest companion is Paul Buchanan’s 2012 solo album Mid Air—a collection of near-demos on piano that further refined his sunken vignettes. “Tear stains on your pillow,” he sings in “Wedding Party,” “I was drunk when I danced with the bride.” The stories—as with most concerning the Blue Nile—are between the lines.
The Blue Nile River
It’s a shame that Hats was never a hit, but it also would have been a shame if it were. It’s hard to imagine being confronted by these songs in the wild. It seems inappropriate to even listen to it in the daytime. You carve out a place to hear Hats; you confide it in other people. An oft-repeated legend about the band involves Paul Buchanan at a Glasgow bar shortly after the release of their debut album. As he downs a few pints among the locals, the conversation turns to music, and someone recommends him a great new band from the area. They’re called the Blue Nile, they say.
You’ll love them, I’ve got their tape in my car. The anecdote illustrates the overarching philosophy for Buchanan’s art, to be removed from it completely. “You hope that someday in the future some kid will be walking along the beach and find a little piece of green glass that has been worn down by the waves,” he once explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. “He’ll pick it up and put it in his pocket, take it home and love it. He won’t necessarily know why he loves it, but he’ll love it. Those are the kind of records we try to make.” In another version of this metaphor, he relates a boy and a girl watching a film on their first date: “They are much more important to each other, hopefully, than the movie is to either one of them.” At the core of Hats is a heartbroken song called “From a Late Night Train,” featuring just piano, trumpet, and Buchanan’s vocals, all combining to sound like rain on the windshield of a parked car. “I know it’s over,” he sings in a low, beaten voice, “But I love you so.” It’s a song that illustrates the stakes of love, sung in the final moments of a relationship when there’s nothing left to say but the inevitable.
The Blue Nile River
On a record filled with questions—Where is the love? What’s so wrong tonight? How do I know you feel it? How do I know it’s true?—sits this gut-punch of an answer. You’re left broken, alone, and in love, looking into someone’s eyes and seeing the end of a dream.