The Blue Nile: Hats

Release date: October 1989. Label: Linn/Virgin. Running time: 39 minutes. Producer: The Blue Nile. Engineer: Calum Malcolm.

The Blue Nile are a beautiful anomaly in today’s media-driven, profile-obsessed, tack-saturated, high-turnover music industry. Since 1983, the Scottish trio have released three quietly beautiful albums, each selling to the same 100,000 people every time.

Two of The Blue Nile are in their mid-30s, the other in his late 40s. The lead singer openly admits that he survives between albums by churning out made-to-order commercial hits for the likes of Annie Lennox. They have never had a hit single, and almost certainly never will. The words "cult status" should be accompanied by their mugshots in the Oxford English Dictionary. Even one listen to Hats makes this inexplicable state of affairs seem all the more puzzling.

The Blue Nile’s second album aroused no more and no less attention than its predecessor, 1983’s A Walk Across The Rooftops. The product of months of studio work in the band’s home city of Glasgow, Hats is a mere 39 minutes in length. Its seven tracks, all written by singer Paul Buchanan, are all virtually identical in musical tone and lyrical approach. Here you go, they seemed to be saying, this is another batch of stuff we knocked together in our spare time, hope you like it, see you same time in six years.

Buchanan dominates The Blue Nile creatively and visually in the same way as Mick Hucknall does Simply Red. Notwithstanding the undoubted talent of bassist Robert Bell and multi-instrumentalist PJ Moore, the 37-year-old Celtic supporter is the key linchpin of the group, even if we disregard the incredible quality of his songwriting. For it is the quality of his voice that prevents Hats being merely a superb exercise in mood music, turning it into one of the most heart-rending, emotionally truthful and genuinely moving records of the modern age.

Buchanan is simply the finest singer I have ever heard.

There is an awesome honesty in his voice, in the way he seems to call out his lines rather than just being content to sing them. On the album’s best track, ‘The Downtown Lights’, he surpasses himself. Listen to how he pauses in the middle of the deathless line "Nobody loves you... this way", while behind him, the other musicians construct an aural panorama of twinkling neon and darkness that is as bewitching in its sheer and simplicity as it is beguiling in its beauty.

Hats is, at times, so tranquil and serene that the prevailing ambience on tracks like ‘From A Late Night Train’ and ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’ resembles a modern jazz record rather than a "rock" one. The actual instrumentation used is orthodox, but it’s what The Blue Nile do with their palette that sets them apart from everyone else. Gentle flecks of guitar float idly by on waves of luxuriant synth, the bass pulses viscously and unhurriedly at the heart of the music, the drums are often so quiet as to be semi-inaudible. Whenever these liquid blues require added colour, there’s the occasional appearance of softly sighing strings and woodwind in the mix.

It should be a criminal act to listen to Hats between the hours of 6am and 9pm. This is a night album, every bit as much as Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way or Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, where the mood is deep, deep blue, where regret and longing hang in the air like physical entities, where the things that aren’t said reverberate for far longer than those that are. Hats embodies the impossible contradiction of "thunderous hush".

Whereas A Walk Across The Rooftops at least possessed one upbeat, urgent track in the form of the gorgeous ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’, there are no such concessions to conventional dynamics here. Hats is an album with a one-track mind, and that track is seven minutes long and extremely placid. Look at those titles for a moment. ‘From A Late Night Train’. ‘The Downtown Lights’. ‘Seven AM’. ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’. ‘Headlights On The Parade’. If The Blue Nile weren’t so breathtakingly good at what they do, they’d be utterly laughable.

Hats received the usual rapturous reviews from critics who were fans of the band, but commercially it failed to stir more than the usual cursory ripple of interest upon its release. More pertinently, despite its undisputed excellence as a piece of music, it has conspicuously failed to influence any other bands of subsequent note. However, given the mediocre-to-low calibre of every other Scottish band making waves in the 1980s (Deacon Blue, Love And Money, Hue & Cry, Danny Wilson), and the lack of quality Scottish acts to emerge this decade (Mogwai and Teenage Fanclub honourably excepted), we should perhaps be grateful.

Hear the slow, majestic surge of guitar and bass that accompanies the start of ‘Over The Hillside’, listen in awe as Buchanan coaxes his golden throat into action once more, and marvel. Hats is proof positive that the phrase ‘white soul’ need not always be a contradiction in terms.

Jonathan O’Brien

About Hats: six of the best

Odd fact

The Blue Nile were "discovered" by the hi-fi manufacturers Linn who used their first tape as a demo and subsequently signed the band to their own newly-launched label.

What they did next

A typically lengthy leave of absence (six years!) was followed by the 1996 release of their long-awaited third album, Peace At Last, to an ecstatic reception.

Star track

‘The Downtown Lights’

Ace lyric line

"Who do you love/when it’s cold and it’s starlight/when the streets are so big and wide/I love you/An ordinary girl/can make the world all right" (‘Saturday Night’)

Magic moment

Buchanan’s cry of "Tomorrow I will be there . . . oh, you wait and see" as a plethora of strings conjure a gorgeous haze in the background, on ‘Over The Hillside’.

Related albums by other artists

Understand (Brian), Hex (Bark Psychosis), Solid Air (John Martyn)