Tension As Release: In Love with The Blue Nile
Looking back at Scotland’s beloved tortured poets after a high-profile name drop
“Drownin’ in The Blue Nile/he sent me ‘Downtown Lights’/I hadn’t heard it in a while…”
Taylor Swift has a young person’s sense of history: selective. She’s always had a way of enthusing about something as if she’s the first person ever to discover it. For people like you or I, who (I presume) give almost too many fucks about the popular musical past, this can sometimes set the teeth on edge. Why shouldn’t you care enough about your tradition to learn it, to already know it, to be sufficiently humble and reverent about it? Oh, you got to jam on stage with McCartney to a Beatles song? Name them all. (Swift has probably spent a night or two indulging a Rob Sheffield phone call re: the relative merits of “What You’re Doing” vs. “I’m Looking Through You”: “what they did, it was just unbelievable. Tears.”)
The unusual factor of being the most successful pop star in the known universe – which she definitely is, and definitely won’t be forever although she’s cutting it close, means a few things. For instance, she can release a 31-track album without a single assertive hook or edited lyric, and go to sleep knowing she’ll wake up to shattered records and a sea of starry-eyed defenders. She can also shoehorn in a reference to another artist – no pop writer tosses a detail in for “texture” as perfunctorily as Swift does now – and double-septuple their sales. It’s no longer especially clear what The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan is up to these days. But hey: it’s heartening to know that on his next several grocery runs, he can really splurge.
Thing is, The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t not sound like The Blue Nile. The elusive, beloved Scots’ lyrical cameo on Swift’s most diaristic album is courtesy of one of at least three muses, TS timeline blip and 1975 mastermind Matty Healy, a very strange person who’s been known to enthuse about the band. Travis Kelce has probably never played them, but returning producer Jack Antonoff is canny enough (and cares about audio engineering enough) to surely know them, too. Poets retains a moody night vibe, the same dreamlike glow Midnights emanated – but sparer and spacier, luminous beams of sustained synths cascading over brittle machine beats, while a central voice emits a contained yearning. Sound familiar?
And while Poets, like The Blue Nile, almost never revs up – you count on the band to hang in that space just before an explosion of euphoric or devastating emotion – the central difference is still one of pacing. Midnights is over a year old, and while Swift has felt perfectly inescapable through its release cycle and her landmark Eras Tour, critics have noted the somewhat underbaked feeling of Tortured Poets. The lyrics are the testimony of a wildly successful aging young person who’s absorbed more validation than literary tricks, and while she never wants to kill her darlings, too many of these songs don’t need to exist. In two decades, which ended two decades ago, The Blue Nile released only a few more songs than she just did.
The Blue Nile’s origins gave little indication of the richness soon to flow. Old school friends Paul Buchanan and Robert Bell picked up a guitar and bass, respectively, and hovered around each other after graduation, eventually folding electronics student PJ Moore into an amateur musical project. The band, at first called Night By Night, didn’t have instrumental proficiency, or original material, or a stable lineup, or a strong sense of ambition – great swathes of time passing without event is key to their history. But once they’d flaked back into a trio, they decided not to locate a new flesh-and-blood drummer – it was 1981 in the UK, after all. Instead, they borrowed a Latin American rhythm machine, and started conceptualizing.
The band has never operated with a sense of urgency. They gigged and woodshedded slowly and with slight embarrassment, playing covers badly to those Latin rhythms. But they began to suss out where their strengths were. Similar to not just the ultraprimitive earliest punks but later contemporaries like Mark Hollis, Paul Buchanan and co. saw that the spaces they couldn’t fill with typical talents or ideas were their expressway to a sound. Slowly and assuredly, they found a deliberate, atmospheric groove, a vibe both simmeringly romantic and crystallized with frost. (I first fell in love with their music gazing out onto a moonlit snowfall, after Hurricane Sandy had knocked all our power out.) “Tinseltown in the Rain,” “The Downtown Lights,” “Headlights on the Parade”: each sounds as sumptuously cinematic as its title.
VIDEO: The Blue Nile “The Downtown Lights”
Buchanan, already a beautifully untutored guitarist, also found his voice. Picture the pub regular most equipped to go for “Strangers in the Night” or “Solitaire” – but he’s a bloke, not some smooth, moneyed crooner. So there’s a dust of strain and tension around his larynx, even as he hits and lingers beautifully through all those broken-bellowed notes. His lyrics are imagistic but not allusive, not consciously poetic; they sketch skeletal scenes, barely, and fill them out with feelings only clearly defined through bursts of spontaneous emotion. “I am in love,” he’ll proclaim over and over, as the music proves him right. Or he’ll let the uncertainty mingle rapturously with the exultation: “how do I know you’ll feel it?” It really is just like rushing through city streets after sundown and rain, dizzied by teary affection and dazzled by the lights off the pavement. And it’s so ‘80s – it’s as if Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” was about two yuppies locking hungry eyes from opposite skyscrapers, and Tony Scott directed the video.
The decidedly un-punk sumptuousness and cleanliness of their music was a strange key to their success. It’s a bit odd to recall that the UK’s “New Pop” wave grew directly out of punk, with groups like ABC and Scritti Politti infiltrating the radio on pointed countercultural missions. The obligatory “right connection” who got the Nile rolling was an ex-punk, former Headboy Calum Malcolm. A friend of the band’s, he got his old label RSO to reissue their first indie single, the pert, almost Gary Numanish “I Love This Life” – but RSO quickly went bankrupt. It wasn’t until years later that the band found itself in a studio again, cutting demos with an increasingly tech-savvy Malcolm engineering. The facility was furnished by Linn Products, of LinnDrum fame, who dropped by one day to check on the proceedings. Malcolm played them what he and the band had been creating, and in the golden age of digital audio demonstration, Linn heard their hook – this band that reckoned itself rather cobbled-together and scruffy sounded like a million bucks.
It was an aptly peculiar stroke of luck, for a band who has only ever been their absolute selves, and whom nobody else has ever resembled. And it’s a characteristic bit of trivia that the group, who were not known in their early days to own a telephone, reportedly took the better part of the year to say yes to Linn. But indeed, A Walk Across the Rooftops was the first album released on Linn Records, just a little over four decades ago. The album is a glorious panorama – all homegrown ethereality, not a speck of it from hiss or fuzz or cheap equipment. But at the same time, it feels entirely sui generis. The drums rush forward, transforming Buchanan’s querulous trepidation into pure momentum, a gentle flurry of hard percussion with the gemlike keyboard hits and Chic-like scratches of guitar. Again, it’s the sound of that moment just before everything bursts or spills out, symphonically elaborated – tension as release.
It was here that the band set to cultivating their public reputation as Great Deliberators, not unlike one of their first celebrity proponents, Peter Gabriel. You simply couldn’t rush The Blue Nile – even an uncommon amount of creative freedom and time off wasn’t enough to hurry a band for whom taking time had been integral to finding an identity. Though the dynamic between the three members has been little explored in interviews, it’s clear that the three can really get to each other, with a particular rift between Moore and Bell/Buchanan. Rustled out of the working methods that brought them their success, the band was off its steady pulse, and after a few years, they found themselves kicked out of their studio and sued by Virgin, the distributor to whom Linn had licensed their material. Back home, and back to having nothing to lose, which they were used to not worrying about – suddenly, with no one at their backs, everything clicked. They soon returned to the studio, and made the bulk of their masterpiece in a matter of months.
I actually prefer A Walk Across the Rooftops to Hats – what sounded audaciously smooth in 1984 gets a little too close to the real fake thing in spots, particularly as “Seven A.M.” is percolating to its attenuated finish. But the titles alone – “Let’s Go Out Tonight,” “From a Light Night Train” – effectively conjure the only vibe this band is ever after, as does the cover – shrouded in shadow, but dressed for the spotlight. “The Downtown Lights” is a career highlight because it’s the unbound climax, the catharsis the catalog’s sweet, slow build has been threatening, Buchanan crying out like David Byrne being strangled two ways by divine hands. Where Rooftops feels like a blur of new gold dreams, here everything glitters in place, a violet sky’s widely spaced stars fixed just so in the firmament. Buchanan’s jubilant desperation has given way to serene satisfaction, by the time a grey-pink dawn gently illuminates the end of “Saturday Night.”
Though they always sounded a little anachronistic, The Blue Nile never sounded righter than in 1989, when they could send an album up to #12 on the UK charts. ‘90s and ‘00s albums followed, which sit uneasily with the myth when you poll all the fans. That post-Hats serenity is the theme of 1996’s Peace at Last, which figures for an auteur whose success had left him in L.A. – running into celebrities at the farmers markets, casually dating Rosanna Arquette. (He drifted apart socially from his bandmates, going as far as settling and signing the band’s new Warners’ deal by himself.) He bought an acoustic guitar and fell in love with it, taking it to Paris and Dublin as the typically piecemeal third-album work dictated. A gospel choir surfaces in the first track, and while the tempered chill and increased organicity is very ‘90s-not-‘80s, the relative departures from such an idiosyncratic sound met with scattered resistance from fans, even if it sounds as pure and honest and beautiful as the rest of the canon (well, not “Holy Love”).
The band drifted slowly into High in 2004, which, appropriate once again to the era, sounds closer to the synthetic textures they were known for. But there’s something too milky, too sugared, too coffeehouse about it – where their lushness first sounded audacious, now it felt too safe. The tension they were so brilliant at cultivating had drifted backward out of the music into their relationships, and though none of these vanilla Scots read like they’ve ever raised a fist in their lives, the chemistry has curdled: since making this album, PJ Moore no longer speaks to his mates. High hit low in the charts, but two years later, Buchanan finally scored a top 10 hit, albeit another band’s – he appeared on the song “Sleep” by the once-massive outfit Texas. He hasn’t released a new album since the pillowy Mid Air, produced by Cameron Malcolm, son of Calum; during its gestation, Buchanan found himself needing to call Bell. He now lives off revenue from collaborations with, and covers by, famous artists in love with his old band.
Well, and a shot in the sales arm from the most famous artist of all, whose testimonial is now the bulk of the band’s “Legacy” entry on Wikipedia – and, who knows, may be placing a phone call out to Glasgow someday soon. Honestly, Taylor’s hosanna is a public service that counterbalances at least a couple of private jet flights. Nothing else sounds like The Blue Nile – a space where the sky is dark and the streets are slick and the lights are blinding and you are in love. Here are three people who spent the best twenty years of their lives waiting for a feeling to surface, feeling around instruments they were no virtuosos playing, vibing quietly with each other until the atmosphere was alive and overwhelming and rushing headlong somewhere sweeter. That feeling is there to drown in anytime you want to lose your breath, frozen in time, glistening like a dead star. It still hits the same – even if you haven’t heard it in a while.
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