Blue Nile

The story of Blue Nile is the story of a cult band. Indeed, the cult band par excellence. The path the three lads from Glasgow took to arrive in the musical world of the 1980s is an unusual one. Linn, a manufacturer of refined and expensive high-end hi-fi components, asked Calum Malcolm for demos for a possible record project, one whose standards would match their latest creation, the Sondek LP12 turntable. The producer had no doubts and put forward some recordings by the Scottish group: and so the story began. Blue Nile's debut was released on vinyl only in 1984, distributed by Virgin. "A Walk Across The Rooftops" is an album that reinvents art-pop through a series of erudite references (Terry Riley, Bela Bartok) and a compelling, twilight-toned urban romanticism; towering over it all is the voice of Paul Buchanan (almost a modern-day Frank Sinatra), the catalyzing element behind the group's mesmeric appeal.

Never much inclined to see themselves as professional musicians, Paul Buchanan, Robert Bell and P.J. Moore didn't play by the rules of the business, releasing just four albums over a span of twenty years. It took a full five years after the debut for a follow-up to arrive: a small masterpiece of romantic, impressionistic pop-rock going by the name of "Hats", its sound monochrome, at times noir, minimal yet airy, electronic yet full of soul, not joyous but compassionate, intimate and at the same time plain-spoken.

"Hats", four letters, one word, an oxymoron, through which the post-punk generation reclaimed the shoots of an ancestral feeling: love. A perfect "Honey At The Core" crafted by three musicians eager to reclaim the romantic, sentimental song — the lived-in, suffered kind sung by Billie Holiday, the elegant, seductive kind sung by Frank Sinatra, and also the bashful, tender kind found in the first stirrings of beat music.

"Hats", four letters replacing the now-standardised "Love", dressing that archaic impulse in new clothes, the champion of encounters between men and women wishing to communicate solely through the lexicon of passion.

A black-and-white cult movie, where the setting shifts from the smoky streets of New York or Chicago to the rain-soaked streets of Glasgow, a collage of seven mini symphonies where technology and emotion tell of urban, nocturnal love affairs, played out in the rain, among buses at their last stop and the neon lights of bars.

The album consolidates all the band's qualities: Buchanan's voice is richer in soul, technological evolution offers warmer electronic textures, and Robert Bell's bass touch is more measured and dry; the avant-garde temptations and occasionally cacophonous dissonances of the debut are more tempered here. It's almost as if the band spent most of their studio time stripping away everything superfluous, leaving the songs' bare bones to carry all the emotional weight. The vulnerability and tension animating these recordings shape an almost melodramatic romanticism, worthy of a Hollywood film. In the end, these are seven tracks that sound like seven little classics.

The soft electronic beat that introduces the notes of "Over The Hillside" is the beating heart of the thirty-five minutes of "Hats", a soul mantra that piles up images of everyday life in a sequence rich with pathos, releasing its tension in the orchestra's romantic refrain.

As in a film, the lights of the screen blur into the real world and silence falls: "The Downtown Lights" is a short film, a neorealist fresco where traffic, city lights, emptying streets and last buses move in sync, while the music interlocks pulsing geometric shapes with chromatic variations akin to a kaleidoscope. "The Downtown Lights" is a modern Sufi dance in praise of love, a genuine masterpiece.

Solemn and introspective, "Let's Go Out Tonight" restores the narrative tone of "Over The Hillside", a lullaby for adults who have never stopped dreaming.

"Headlights On The Parade" opens side two with a synth-bass riff wrapped in keyboards and a piano roaming in full harmonic freedom, a bitter, solitary pop song that failed to make a dent in the charts (No. 72 in the UK), despite its more epic, linear tone.

Conversely, "From A Late Night Train" is the exact opposite of "Headlights On The Parade": melancholy is palpable in every lyrical space, piano and voice hold up a deliberately spartan arrangement, where the few alien instrumental touches (the trumpet) carry the charm of memories; it's a ballad for a sleepwalker rather than a dreamer, as the silence of darkness falls.

Feelings and hopes drained dry, Buchanan wonders where love has gone, but finds no answer even in what may be the most bitter and solitary song the Blue Nile ever wrote, "Seven A.M."; the line "Stop! Go" rings out like the last spiritual utterance of a troubled, defeated soul.

Like all great neo-romantic albums, "Hats" offers no solutions or hope: the notes of the closing "Saturday Night" promise no final redemption, only contemplation and wonder, two emotions that life can offer through a chance encounter with an ordinary girl who manages to make your Saturday night special. The violins rise majestically, celebrating the epiphany of the everyday.

"Hats" is an album that suffers rather than one born of suffering, meditative rather than meditated upon, the fruit of a very complex period for the three musicians. But the language is universal, the music is limpid, like a mirror, a sonic diary in which each of us can find ourselves, to exorcise pain and loneliness. In these thirty-five minutes of new-symphonia, love transcends the norm and becomes the biography of common, universal feelings.

Industrial post-romanticism is born.

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04/12/2016