A Walk Across The Rooftops

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Holmes, Tim (26 September 1985). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops". Rolling Stone. No.457. pp.101–102. Archived from the original on 24 August 2007 . Retrieved 11 September 2011. Buchanan and Bell toured England and Scotland in May and June 2006, followed by Scotland and Ireland in November 2006, billed as "Paul Buchanan sings the songs of the Blue Nile", refraining from simply calling themselves the Blue Nile as a mark of respect for Moore's absence. The band consisted of Buchanan on vocals and guitar, Bell on bass guitar and keyboards, Alan Cuthbertson and Brendan Smith on keyboards, Stuart McCredie on guitar, and Liam Bradley on drums. On 14 July 2007, Buchanan and Bell played at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester as part of the Manchester International Festival. In July 2008, the band played shows at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Somerset House in London and the Radisson Hotel in Galway. As it turned out, when the time was right they wouldn’t need to look for a deal. RSO had donated cash to record more songs with Calum Malcolm, whose friendship with Ivor Tiefenbrun, founder of audio equipment company Linn Products, meant some of their gear had been installed at Castlesound. Having been let go by Linn and Virgin Records, the group signed a deal with Warner Bros. Records in 1992, although it later transpired that Buchanan had made the deal by himself without informing his bandmates. His explanation was that "none of the others were in town at the time". [23] 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. [24] The first two Blue Nile albums have a similar haunting quality that shows no sign of becoming dated. For those of us who lived there at the time, they are also a welcome reminder that there was more to 1980s Britain than very bad haircuts and the brutally awful Thatcher government.

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. [28] 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. [31] Legacy [ edit ] Having put out their debut single "I Love This Life" in 1981, the Blue Nile spent the next couple of years playing gigs in their native Glasgow: with little money and due to singer Paul Buchanan's limited ability on the guitar, by necessity their songs were stripped-down cover versions of old songs, and as Buchanan later said, "I suppose to some extent that started to bleed into our own songs – there was more and more space in what we were doing". Buchanan and Robert Bell's songs would start out written on an acoustic guitar or a piano, and then together with third member Paul Joseph "PJ" Moore and engineer Calum Malcolm the songs would be rearranged in the studio. [5] Even the frustrations, perhaps of romance or maybe of wider permanent self-acceptance and illustrated by the lyric “Stop/Go/Stop/Go” suggest automobile traffic as much as human pedestrians. Hats sold better in the UK than A Walk… and in the US A&M records used a toll-free number in an ad to give away free copies (although presumably home-taping was still killing music). No production values could hope to distract from Buchanan’s voice, though, the anguish and sadness being impossible to conceal or disguise. The album has some excellent uptempo moments such as “Headlights on The Parade” when all the yearning seems to reach a joyful crescendo of sorts, but it must be said that anyone who wants a record which provides a pretty unrelenting opportunity to really wallow in gorgeous, sublime, melancholy should dive into this one. Things arguably get a bit out of balance on “Let’s Go Out Tonight” where the sluggish pace and mournfulness seem to contradict the title – and no one in their right mind would wish to go out with Buchanan in that state. He sounds morose to the point of being incapable of even getting his round in. People tend to flag up The Blue Nile’s Scottishness, as if geography and accidents of birth were responsible for artistic vision; but surely, again like Hopper, the dreams and tears here are universal. The city streets, cars, rooftops, rain, couples and love documented and expressed so delicately throughout the seven songs are potentially everywhere, any time, “caught up in this big rhythm”. This is why the band stood out then and hover above now; both everymen and angels.With his own studio, Castlesound, and his own band, The Headboys – who’d had a hit for the label in 1979 with The Shape Of Things To Come – he’d first cut his teeth recording traditional Scottish music before working with early Postcard Records acts, including Josef K and Orange Juice, not to mention The Krankies on It’s Fan-Dabi-Dozi! In 1989 Record Mirror placed A Walk Across the Rooftops at number 74 in its critics' list of the best albums of the 1980s. [33] The Guardian included A Walk Across the Rooftops in their 2007 feature 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die, saying, "This stunning debut album was an 80s high-water mark ... The arrangements meld electro and contemporary classical influences into a rich and satisfyingly yearning whole." [34] The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. [35] It was Kid Jensen that was playing it,” Buchanan told Johnnie Walker, “and for some reason somebody said to us, ‘It’s No.126 in the charts’. I remember thinking, ‘That’s fantastic!’ And that was a Friday, I think. Anyway, on the Monday the company was bankrupt. It wasn’t the best start.” Nonetheless, Bell told Melody Maker, “That was the turning point. After that we decided to think about writing music in the long term.” They only made four albums in 20 years, so The Blue Nile’s every record is precious. but the Scottish trio’s debut, A Walk Across The Rooftops, offered an as yet unsurpassed strain of sober but stirring synth-pop…

Harrison, Ian (January 2013). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops / Hats". Q. No.318. p.117.

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Dolan, Karen J. (October 1985). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops". Spin. Vol.1, no.6. p.31 . Retrieved 7 January 2022. 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. [16] A gospel choir made a brief appearance on the first single, " Happiness". Despite the release of Peace at Last on a major label, critical reaction to the album was more mixed than for the band's previous records, [4] although sales were good, entering the UK album chart at #13. Top 40, Stichting Nederlandse. "The Blue Nile". Top40.nl (in Dutch) . Retrieved 1 January 2022. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) As a side note, to keep things in context for younger listeners or for those of us who have forgotten, it must be remembered that in 1983 samplers as we know them did not exist. All of the sounds on the recording had to be physically played and recorded on snippets of tape and then edited and cut and finally taped together to create the masters. This endeavor was pain staking and slow. The exacting standards and obsession over every detail by the band also added to the time it took to record the album, but that commitment is what made it so good. Recording Engineer Malcolm recalls of the period of recording, “ They were always particularly sensitive to not doing the wrong thing and making sure it had the absolutely right emotional impact.” Thankfully they had a record label that possessed the necessary patience to wait for the end result. The album would finally debut in May of 1984.

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. Selling Out": A Premiere and Interview with Duncan Sheik, Plus Introducing Darlingside, and Exclusives by Jaye Bartell and Hugh Cornwell". HuffPost. 18 September 2015 . Retrieved 1 January 2022. McGalliard, James (15 December 2004). "An Ordinary Miracle". Inpress. Melbourne, Australia: Street Press Australia. Speaking to Dutch TV show Top 2000 A Gogo in 2013, Buchanan explained, “Tinseltown is a metaphor. It’s whatever your dream is, whatever your Tinseltown was, whatever you lost. And I think in our minds what was interesting to us was the kind of universal nature of cities… Glasgow’s obviously not the same scale as New York, but if you just shrunk it down to a corner, it could be. It could be anywhere.” Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London, England: Guinness World Records Ltd. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7.

By 1990, however, Irish broadcaster Dave Fanning was suggesting on air that 80,000 copies had been shifted. “It’s sold a lot more than that, actually,” Buchanan modestly corrected him. “I think we just don’t want to attract attention to any thoughts about ourselves.” Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). Guinness World Records Limited. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7.

Belcher, David (20 July 1993). "Still in full flow". The Herald. Glasgow, Scotland: Caledonian Newspaper Publishing . Retrieved 4 April 2013. Five months later, though, they emerged from Castlesound, and – thanks to Buchanan’s deeply moving delivery, the band’s startlingly bare arrangements and an overall, undeniably fastidious attention to detail – it soon became clear that, despite only boasting seven songs, A Walk Across The Rooftops was going to have long legs. Belcher, David (16 February 1996). "Digging up a rare new jewel from the Nile". The Herald. Glasgow, Scotland: Caledonian Newspaper Publishing . Retrieved 4 April 2013.

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Gross, Joe (25 February 2019). "From 'Captain Marvel' to SXSW". Austin360 . Retrieved 7 January 2022. 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 its only chart entry, peaking at No. 10 on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart. MacDonald, Bruno (2006). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops". In Dimery, Robert (ed.). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Universe Publishing. p.508. ISBN 978-0-7893-1371-3. No one was more surprised than the band. “I’m just astounded that it’s taken off,” Buchanan told Melody Maker. They’d be so successful at maintaining this low profile Buchanan would later admit to The Herald that “people I went to school with have recommended the records to me… We kept out of the way because I wanted people to think about a better world. I didn’t want them to be thinking about me.”