The Blue Nile - Hats
Written by Nathan Evans
Additional Editing by Anouska Liat
For anyone looking to build their career and see the world moving forward at a frantic pace, they are instructed to live in the city, but few remember to tell of how mentally foreboding the prospect can be. Though the extreme condensity is thrilling from a newcomer’s perspective, everyone eventually feels that overwhelming entrapment, simultaneously compressed and left alone. Glaswegian band The Blue Nile, and particularly frontman and musical director Paul Buchanan, are deeply entrenched with this experience.
Their second record Hats came 5 years after the band’s sleeper-hit debut, however it was almost left on the cutting room floor altogether. Beginning at Castlesound Studios, 60 miles east of Glasgow just after releasing the promising A Walk Across the Rooftops, they were dogged by homesickness, exhaustion, and legal pressure from Virgin Records, who demanded new material. Backs against the wall, they had no option but to return to their hometown. Under the Glaswegian street lights, now free from time constraints, Buchanan and co. overcame writer’s block. The Blue Nile rebounded back to Castleford with breeding ideas; the positive effect of their travels was so strong that the band went from spending 3 years writing scrapped material, to recording half of the final LP in the space of a week. The sensation of feeling small in the big city again informed the thematic and tonal direction of Hats - a melancholic tantra on the anxieties of urban life.
The tracklist itself, littered with ‘nights’ and ‘lights’, seemingly straining slumber with late trains and early mornings, alludes to the stresses and excesses of city living, and subsequently how it can take its toll on oneself and significant others. As though he were writing a screenplay, Buchanan uses these 7 songs to develop a character who is desperate to be a regular urbanite that is a part of the city, (‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’) but is just as much a bystander as the people he observes, (‘The Downtown Lights’). Concomitantly, he is working his way back to his lover, (‘Over the Hillside’) comparing her love to the joy that comes from a night on the town, (‘Saturday Night’). In every chapter, though, the background is a sprawl of nocturnes similar to an Edward Hopper painting; stark, spacious, and with a clear contrast between light and dark. ‘From a Late Night Train’ is a solemn ballad from a heartbroken Buchanan, ruing the loss of his true love, leaving him to make ultimately seemingly pointless observations as a method of distraction. The faint trumpet on the track accentuates his sheer bleakness, drifting like cigarette smoke from an occupied ashtray. A light piano goes hand-in-hand as ‘it’s over now, but I love you so much’ treacles from his lips.
Other moments are equally reserved for thoughts about escaping the concrete jungle, such as ‘Headlights on the Parade’. Though lyrically not as dense, the instrumental paints the tale symmetrically, via a locomotive beat and elastic bass that together carry a cross-country momentum. All the while, elevated strings and an uplifting piano brings the type of excited peppiness that comes from venturing out in search of fresh surroundings.
Compositionally, the tracks laced into the stitching of Hats run much longer than the average radio tune, and this speaks to how the group stood antithetical to the vacuous bubblegum synth-pop of the time. Instead they chose to build something that took its time, establishing a far deeper connection. Take ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’, a much more lumbering cut that sees a nylon guitar slow-dancing with key chords as a thumb piano gently plucks away at their heels. The Blue Nile were unique for their shunning of the excess of the 80s, instead whisking the listener up using a more cerebral approach. Easily, the best example of this is ‘The Downtown Lights’.
Greeting us with a set of gated drums bouncing off the synth notes that levitate underneath, many may recognise the 1975-lifted production. Yet while their uplifting aims are for maximum bombast, only the original possesses that Fantasia-like whimsy that shines through the track like the moonlit skyline of a restless metropolis. Stood on top is an iconic vocal from Buchanan, whose voice isn’t the strongest, mind; he instead gifts the track an amorous angst that few can nowadays, let alone amongst the histrionics of the neon decade.
Though The Blue Nile had a legal run-in with Virgin Records, their music was actually licensed out to the label by their actual record company, Hi-Fi equipment company Linn, who famously saw them perform and created a record company specifically to release their albums. The band’s music was used to showcase the quality of the company’s speaker systems, which is telling of how sophisticated and well-produced the material is. Be it because of the group’s long gestation period or in spite of their quick recording period, Hats is a pristinely-polished gem from yesteryear, a sui generis of 80s sheen. Songs like the opener, ‘Over the Hillside’, show how the record manages to dress contemporary new wave in an arresting sophisti-pop livery. Awaking with slow machine pulses and lingering droplets of synth dripping off every downbeat, there are clear nods to a certain soft-rock outfit in the form of Police-esque guitar chords and Sting-like vocals from Buchanan. Careful not to imitate, the mix expands to bring in very diaphanous strings that swell in the second chorus, as well as a tonne of space; everything is kissed with an architectural echo. The remainder of the album is similarly vaporous, continuing to marry two 80s-raised genres and in the end crafting one of the decade’s most definitive artefacts. Nonetheless, it still stands out today from the panache of the 80s as something unrestricted from the world it once lived in.