The Blue Nile (band)

The Blue Nile were a Scottish band which originated in 1981 in Glasgow. The group's early music was built heavily on synthesizers and electronic instrumentation and percussion, although later works featured guitar more prominently. Following early championing by established artists such as Rickie Lee Jones and Peter Gabriel (the band later worked with both acts), the Blue Nile gained critical acclaim, particularly for their first two albums A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats, and some commercial success in both the UK and the US, which led to the band working with a wide range of musicians from the late 1980s onwards.

The Blue Nile's highest chart placement came when "Tinseltown in the Rain" reached No. 28 in the Netherlands in 1984, their only Dutch charting song. The band has had four top 75 hits on the UK singles chart, the highest being "Saturday Night", which reached No. 50 in 1991. In the United States, "The Downtown Lights" was their only chart entry, peaking at No. 10 on Billboards Alternative Songs chart. The band members have also gained a reputation for their avoidance of publicity, their idiosyncratic dealings with the recording industry, and their perfectionism and slow work rate, which has resulted in the release of just four albums since the group's formation in 1981.

In 1989, Record Mirror ranked A Walk Across the Rooftops at number 74 in its critics' list of the best albums of the 1980s. The Guardian included A Walk Across the Rooftops in their 2007 feature 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Their second album, Hats, featured strongly on the end of year critics' lists, making number eight on Melody Makers albums of the year list, and number 18 on NMEs list. It was also voted number 345 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). Q placed Hats at number 92 on its list of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever" in 2000 and at number 38 on its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s" in 2006.

History

Early years

Paul Buchanan (born 16 April 1956, Edinburgh, Scotland) and his childhood friend Robert Bell grew up together in Glasgow. They both attended the University of Glasgow in the late 1970s, Buchanan gaining a degree in literature and medieval history, Buchanan's civil servant father had been a semi-professional musician and had musical instruments in the house, but it was only after he and Bell had graduated that Buchanan began to think seriously about a career in music.

Although Buchanan had grown up in the same neighbourhood as Paul Joseph "PJ" Moore, they only became well acquainted at university, where Moore was studying electronics, and the three friends became part of a band, first known as McIntyre (named after the John McIntyre Building, the university's administrative offices) and then Night by Night, although Buchanan later commented that Night by Night only played "twice, maybe three times" in its short existence. The band struggled to retain a settled line-up and, by 1981, Buchanan, Bell and Moore were the only remaining members. They decided not to recruit anybody else, trading in a guitar for an effect pedal and borrowing an old drum machine that only played Hispanic American music rhythms.), the group managed to raise enough money to record and release its first single, "I Love This Life", on their own Peppermint Records label. RSO licensed the single for distribution,

A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982–1984)

thumb|right|Glasgow in 1983, a year before the release of their single "[[Tinseltown in the Rain" which is credited as an "ode to the city of Glasgow"]]

Undaunted by this setback, they continued to play gigs around Glasgow, starting to write their own songs alongside the cover versions they were playing. Having no drummer and with limited musical ability, particularly in Buchanan's guitar playing (he later admitted that "we could play a little, but I was the worst by a long way"), the newly formed Blue Nile adopted an atmospheric, electronic approach primarily out of pragmatism. The band also made the most of their imagination, thrift and mechanical ingenuity. Buchanan recalled, "PJ had bought a tray from a waiter. It was made of zinc and it made a good noise when you hit it. We sampled it and PJ made a pad to trigger it from for £3. It was all very primitive back then — you had to hit it about two seconds before you wanted the sound to appear in the song."

The most commonly told story about the Blue Nile is that in 1983 they were approached by a local hi-fi manufacturer, Linn Products, and asked to produce a song that would showcase the Linn equipment to best effect. Linn was so pleased with the resulting record that it offered the Blue Nile a contract to make a whole album, and set up its own record label specifically to release it.

In interviews, both Buchanan and Moore have categorically denied that Linn approached the band to make a record for them, or that the record company influenced the album's sound in any way at all, with Moore saying, "It was a myth that we were a 'hi-fi band signed to a hi-fi company'. We just got lucky that we'd found our way to an excellent engineer who knew the company." The engineer in question was Calum Malcolm, with whom the band had already recorded some demos in his Castlesound studio near Edinburgh. Since Malcolm was a friend of Linn's founder Ivor Tiefenbrun, and had ties with the company, his studio was fitted out with Linn equipment. When Linn representatives visited one day and asked to hear some music to test out their new speakers, Malcolm played them the demo of "Tinseltown in the Rain". Impressed, Linn offered the band a contract with the record label it was in the process of setting up. Despite the fact that the group took nine months to reply to Linn's offer, the contract was eventually signed and its first album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, was released as Linn Records' first album in May 1984. In 1984, the band gained greater exposure in Europe, with the videos for their two singles, "Stay" and "Tinseltown in the Rain", often shown on the video channel Music Box. The band's profile began to grow, although its existence remained precarious. Buchanan commented, "I've always found it strange that people missed the 'punk' aspect of A Walk Across the Rooftops. We were living in a flat in Glasgow with no hot water. We barely knew what we were doing and that was very liberating." In 2022, Moore recalled that his working relationship with Buchanan had already become "seriously strained", and that at one point "Paul was terrified to go into the studio, because I'd be in the studio and [he thought] I was going to ruin his buzz. It was falling apart." Warmer and smoother sounding than the first album, and exploring the highs and lows of romantic love, Hats peaked at No. 12 on the UK Albums Chart. It was also the group's breakthrough record in the US, where it reached No. 108 on the US Billboard 200 albums chart in May 1990. All three singles released in the UK from the album made the top 75 in the UK Singles Chart.

The Blue Nile's first live public performance after making A Walk Across the Rooftops was in December 1989 on the television programme Halfway to Paradise, a Scottish-based arts magazine show broadcast on Channel 4. The band also composed and performed the theme tune for the programme, later released as a single B-side. The band played two songs with the American singer Rickie Lee Jones (who had recently befriended the band and had become one of its biggest supporters), performing her own "Flying Cowboys" and the Blue Nile's "Easter Parade". The duet version of "Easter Parade" was used as the B-side of both Jones's 1990 single, "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying", and the 12" single of "Headlights on the Parade". During 1990, the Blue Nile supported Jones on her US tour (their experience in America was filmed by BBC Scotland for a documentary titled Flags and Fences), followed by a tour of the UK culminating in two homecoming gigs in September 1990 at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, becoming the first non-classical band to play at the newly opened venue.

Peace at Last (1991–1996)

The radio play gained by Hats in the US, in particular the single "The Downtown Lights", brought the Blue Nile to the attention of several well-known US-based musicians. In 1991, the band was invited to Los Angeles to work on songs by Julian Lennon, Robbie Robertson and Michael McDonald. As a result, Buchanan moved to Los Angeles and lived there for a while, and had a relationship with the actress Rosanna Arquette between 1991 and 1993. Speaking about that period of his life Buchanan said, "It really was interesting. I have to say it was lived in all earnest ... And there was much good there, I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it ... The great thing all the time was you were constantly wanting to phone friends and say, Guess who's in the shop? Guess who's in the supermarket? I'm not immune to all that. In the movies—celluloid's better than life isn't it? It makes everything glossy. I don't mean it's better, but it's so glamorous, I met lots of people—it was fascinating." The band decided that it wanted to find somewhere private to record its new album with its portable studio, and began travelling around Europe searching for suitable locations. Having spent two years looking at and dismissing locations in cities such as Venice, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the record was finally recorded piecemeal over three locations in Paris, Dublin and Los Angeles.

In June 1996, seven years after Hats, the Blue Nile released a third album, entitled Peace at Last. It displayed a marked difference in style to the first two albums, with Buchanan's acoustic guitar work more to the fore. Buchanan recalled that he had bought the guitar in a New York music shop, and by coincidence Robert Bell had seen the guitar earlier the same day and called Buchanan to tell him about it. A remixed version of the single "Tinseltown in the Rain" was used as the theme song for the BBC Scotland TV series Tinsel Town, broadcast in 2000 and 2001.

After the longest period yet between albums, the Blue Nile released High in August 2004. Part of the lengthy delay in making the record was due to Buchanan contracting a form of chronic fatigue syndrome which affected his health for two years, but as he explained on the album's release, it was mostly a result of the band's perfectionism taking hold once again, "We recorded an album and a half and ... we realised we weren't in love with it ... The vast majority of it we just dumped; we just put it to one side and didn't touch it any more." The album reached number 10 on the UK Albums Chart, the highest position to date for the band. Although acoustic guitar is still present on some tracks, the overall musical sound is more reminiscent of Hats.

Hiatus and future (2005)

It became apparent during the recording of High that old tensions among the band members had resurfaced. Buchanan's comments in a 2012 interview seemed to indicate that the album was finished out of a sense of duty and loyalty rather than any willingness to do so. "When we eventually finished High, I don't think it was bristling with the same joy and naivety we'd felt when we started. We'd gathered ourselves long enough to make it. It seemed to me a stoic record, to some extent a record about ourselves, though I didn't realise that 'til later. It was a collected and fairly stoic record which I was proud of and, in a sense, we just made ourselves focus. We showed up, we went into the room and worked, and whatever drift had set in we were loyal to each other and we knew we had to form the wagons into a circle." and in a 2013 interview his terse reply to the question of a reunion was, "I think stuff happened that was simply beyond the pale. It's a shame, but if the feeling for sitting down together really isn't there, then continuing to do so even because you want to is pointless."

In July 2008, the band played shows at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Somerset House in London and the Radisson Hotel in Galway. In September 2010, a biography of the Blue Nile by the Scottish journalist Allan Brown, titled Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile, was published. Although Brown was a long-time acquaintance of Buchanan, he found Buchanan reluctant to participate, and both Bell and Moore refused Brown's invitations for interviews or any co-operation with the book's writing.

In May 2012, Buchanan released his first (and, to date, only) solo album, Mid Air, a collection of short, stripped-back songs mostly with just Buchanan's voice and piano, recorded with Calum Malcolm's son Cameron as the album's engineer and released on Buchanan's own Newsroom Records label. In a radio interview, Buchanan mentioned that towards the end of the recording process he had called in Robert Bell to help out on two tracks ("Mid Air" and "My True Country") that neither he nor Cameron Malcolm were satisfied with. Bell also later remixed "Buy a Motor Car", which appeared on the deluxe edition of the album released in October 2012. The album peaked at number 14 on the UK Albums Chart of 2 June 2012, and its title track, "Mid Air", was used a year later in the Richard Curtis film, About Time.

In November 2012, Virgin Records released two-CD "Collector's Edition" versions of the band's first two albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats. Each version had the original album remastered by engineer Calum Malcolm, along with a bonus disc of rare and previously unreleased material selected by Buchanan and Bell. A similar reissue of the third album, Peace at Last, was released on 3 March 2014. In July 2016, Buchanan took part in the David Bowie Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. His performance of Bowie's "I Can't Give Everything Away" was praised by The Guardian.

In 2019, the band's major label albums were re-issued on vinyl, with a re-issue of High charting at number 74 in the UK charts after being released by Confetti Records on 5 June 2020 as vinyl or double CD edition.

Legacy

The band has influenced future musicians such as Duncan Sheik, who covered the song "Stay", as well as Wild Beasts.

Matty Healy, the 1975's lead singer and primary songwriter, labeled the Blue Nile his "favourite band of all time" and declared Hats to be his "favourite record of the '80s." Healy would describe the 1975's 2018 song "Love It If We Made It" as the "Blue Nile on steroids" and told Entertainment Weekly that "I wanted to reference 'The Downtown Lights'; I didn't want to hide away from referencing it. I wanted it to be fucking obvious to people that know." Taylor Swift, who had previously been in a relationship with Healy, referenced the band in her 2024 song "Guilty as Sin?" with the opening lyrics "Drowning in the Blue Nile, he sent me 'Downtown Lights', I hadn't heard it in a while." Streams for "The Downtown Lights" rose 1,400% in the four-day period following the release of Swift's album. Ten days after the album's release, the vinyl stock of all four of the Blue Nile's albums were sold out on their website.

Discography

Albums

{|class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"

|+List of studio albums, with selected details and peak chart positions

! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Title

! scope="col" rowspan="2" | Details

! scope="col" colspan="6" | Peak chart positions

! rowspan="2" style="width:10em;"| Certifications

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| SCO

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| UK

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| AUS

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| BEL

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| NZ

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| US

! scope="row"| A Walk Across the Rooftops

Released: 30 April 1984
Label: Linn
Format: LP, cassette, CD

| 12 || 80 || 84 || – || 24 || –

BPI: Silver

! scope="row"| Hats

Released: 9 October 1989
Label: Linn
Format: LP, cassette, CD

| 6 || 12 || – || — || – || 108

! scope="row"| Peace at Last

Released: 10 June 1996
Label: Warner Bros.
Format: LP, cassette, CD

| 3 || 13 || – || – || 46 || –

! scope="row"| High

Released: 30 August 2004
Label: Sanctuary
Format: LP, CD, digital download

| 4 || 10 || – || 48 || – || –

BPI: Silver

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| SCO

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| NL

! scope="col" style="width:2.5em;font-size:90%;"| US Alt

! scope="row"| "I Love This Life"

| 1981