the blue nile

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 Billboard's 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 Maker's albums of the year list, and number 18 on NME's 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, Bell a degree in mathematics. 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. Buchanan later recalled, "We went and gigged, because we needed the money, we'd do gigs where we'd do cover versions with the cassette of Latin American rhythms. And we were terrible. But we picked songs that were so completely durable and well known that people recognized them. No matter how badly we mangled them."

Renaming themselves the Blue Nile (after the title of the 1962 book by Alan Moorehead), the group managed to raise enough money to record and release its first single, "I Love This Life", on their own Peppermint Records label. Only a limited number were produced, but one found its way to RSO Records via their friend and engineer Calum Malcolm. Malcolm had been a member of short-lived Edinburgh punk band The Headboys who had released their records on the RSO label, and he still had contacts with the company. RSO licensed the single for distribution, but almost as soon as the record was released RSO went bankrupt and was absorbed into the PolyGram recording company, and the single consequently disappeared.