A Walk Across The Rooftops

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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." [16]

Carroll, Jim (26 August 2004). "And quiet flows the Nile". The Irish Times. Dublin, Ireland: The Irish Times Trust . Retrieved 4 April 2013. I turned to music because it was a way that you could get in touch with yourself,” Buchanan told Popmatters. “You could put two notes together and if it felt right to you, if it made you happy or sad, that was what mattered.” Read more: Album By Album – Sade Read more: Making The KLF’s The White RoomBrown, Allan (2010). Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile. Edinburgh, Scotland: Polygon Books. ISBN 978-1-84697-138-9. Complicating matters further still – on top of visits, Malcolm reveals, by The Krankies’ “magnificent and inspiring” producer, Peter Kerr, who would drop in “encouraging us and offering sage advice on ‘the business’ of the record business!” – samplers were still a luxury, so every unfamiliar sound on the record had to be played and recorded, then painstakingly edited on tape, while “each drum part,” Malcolm stresses, “had to be manually sync’d by hitting a button on Paul’s box in time.” Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). Guinness World Records Limited. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7. 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. That A Walk Across The Rooftops began its commercial life in humble fashion is fitting, because it’s obsessed with minutiae.

Gross, Joe (25 February 2019). "From 'Captain Marvel' to SXSW". Austin360 . Retrieved 7 January 2022. 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. 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.While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including Vashti Bunyan, Phil Collins, and the 1975, 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. 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… 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.

Kelly, Jennifer (30 January 2013). "At the Source of the Blue Nile: An Interview with Paul Buchanan". PopMatters . Retrieved 10 March 2013.

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The myth goes like this, The Blue Nile was approached by Linn Products, a local hi fi manufacturer, to produce a song to showcase the company’s sound systems. The song the band created pleased Linn founder Ivor Tiefenbrun so much he decided to specifically create a record label for their release A Walk Across the Rooftops. The real truth was Tiefenbrun was a friend of Calum Malcolm and when he played a demo of Tinseltown is in the Rain to Ivor he was extremely impressed; so much so that he offered the band a contract with the prospective record label. Linn Records was already in the process of being set up when the encounter in the studio took place and signing was not a slam dunk for the band. It would take the band 9 months to accept the offer, but it proved to be the best fit for the band. Linn upon signing the band left them alone allowing them tremendous artistic freedom in the studio. Tiefenbrun when asked about why the label did not inject themselves into the process with an untried band replied, “ (The band) was so fervent about what they were doing that nothing would dissuade them from it and nothing would persuade them to do anything other than what they were doing.” In the run up to entering the recording studio Buchanan and Bell would write songs on an acoustic guitar or piano and later P.J. Moore and Calum Malcolm would have at the songs in the studio. The band would recruit drummer Nigel Thomas to assist with percussion. The album would take 5 months to record at Castlesound Studios in Pencaitland, Scotland. 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. a b c Murray, Robin (20 November 2012). "Tinseltown In The Rain: The Blue Nile". ClashMusic . Retrieved 14 March 2013.

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.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!