Hats

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To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights. By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks. Hats featured strongly on the end of year critics' lists, making number eight on Melody Maker 's albums of the year list, [21] and number 18 on NME 's list. [22] "The Downtown Lights" was also placed at number 15 on Melody Maker 's singles of the year list. [23]

From there, the fault lines make themselves more obviously known. At best, “Let’s Go Out Tonight” is the strung-out manifesto for a self-destructive couple; more likely, it’s a desperate plea to give everything one more shot, that one more night might relocate some sense of wonder. “Headlights On The Parade,” like “The Downtown Lights,” is the catchier side of Hats— and unlike most of the album, it’s where you could be lured into a sense of euphoria, as if it’s the moment where that wonder actually was recalled or reclaimed, that moment in a night out when you can temporarily fool yourself into thinking anything’s possible. Pitchfork Staff (10 September 2018). "The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s". Pitchfork . Retrieved 24 April 2023. The results aren't far off from the romantic synth-pop that ascended the charts in the '80s... Larkin, Colin (2000). All Time Top 1000 Albums (3rded.). London: Virgin Books. p.137. ISBN 0-7535-0493-6. Heim, Chris (15 March 1990). "Blue Nile: Hats (A & M)". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved 24 October 2015. The Blue Nile’s career defies narrative. Like the music, the story itself is all ellipses. Yet as much as they favored gestures and leaving things not-totally-said, their albums remain complete ideas. These albums might not entirely reveal themselves, but they are there, waiting, for you to find your own meaning in them. With Hats in particular, the thing they left behind is pristine yet worn, a crystal covered in grime and tears but still shining through.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. Holden, Stephen (30 July 1990). "Review/Pop; The Blue Nile's Mystical, Majestic Ballads". The New York Times. New York . Retrieved 7 February 2023. Hats was voted number 345 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). [24] 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. [25] [26] Legacy [ edit ] Stay and Heatwave are heroically restrained; Easter Parade and Automobile Noise are elegies full of ghosts and blood. The previously unreleased St. Catherine’s Day is as sad and beautiful as can be. Both this and Hats still take the top of your head off, gently. I have the same Nimbus copy, bought in The Netherlands when I lived there. I just ripped it, and no problems. I'm listening on headphones as I type, no issues.

Sodomsky, Sam (27 November 2018). "The 1975's Matty Healy Dissects Every Song on A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on 11 January 2021 . Retrieved 23 February 2021. Despite recurring spikes of interest and occasional attempts at exposing more listeners to the catalog — expanded remasters of their albums appeared earlier this decade, and new vinyl reissues were recently announced — there is something about the Blue Nile that makes them feel as if they will always be a secret buried in time. They’re the sort of transfixing and elusive artist where, when you first discover them, you will alternate between telling everyone you’ve ever known about them with the fervor of an evangelist, and retreating to protect this precious thing you have found. There’s a way in which their music can very much feel like its your own, not to be shared with anyone. That you can only discuss it with the sort of hushed awe from which it seems to be born. Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.”

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In some ways, you can almost hear Hats as taking place in one 24-hour period, a final struggle to salvage a depleted relationship under the beacons of skyscrapers giving way to a dark night of the soul. “Over The Hillside” is the approach, a prelude that strives to locate rejuvenation on the horizon, that old iconography of that something else at the other end of the journey. “The Downtown Lights” is the welcoming fanfare, the poppier single that makes you feel embraced by the city, full of anticipation as much as broken fragments. s A Walk Across the Rooftops remains unique in its fusion of chilly technology and a pitch of confessional, romantic soul that ‘alternative’ types would usually shy away from for fear it wasn’t ‘cool’. It was always (at least) two things at once: in the years since, its peerless power to affect has accrued multiple layers of rueful resonance. a b Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7. Murray, Robin (20 November 2012). "Tinseltown In The Rain: The Blue Nile". ClashMusic.com . Retrieved 10 March 2013. More importantly, as has been reaffirmed on this year’s stripped-down solo psalm Mid Air, Paul Buchanan’s enraptured voice and words capture the essence of hearts breaking and healing as well as anyone outside Tamla Motown’s heyday.

Part of the reason Hats has drawn so many people in, part of why it still feels so enigmatic, is that it exists in liminal spaces. It is between swells of love and relationships crumbling, it is between the weathered final strains of one night and the fresh start of another. It is between genres, it is between eras. It is between the realities of our surroundings and the dreams we project onto them. If you have spent any time traversing a city at night while listening to Hats, you know it’s the sound of being out amongst all of this apparent opportunity, but still feeling isolated and listless within all of it. It’s the sound of living some years, and wandering familiar streets as if they’ll finally provide an unexpected answer. In the face of all this theoretical newness, you instead can’t shake the feeling of loss, the feeling that there should’ve been something more, the feeling of time having passed, the feeling that you will never stop searching for something you can’t actually hold. Hats (CD liner notes). The Blue Nile (remastereded.). Virgin Records. 2012. LKHCDR 2. {{ cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) ( link) The story about Hats, and the Blue Nile in general, is uncustomary, though it began normally enough: While attending the University Of Glasgow, Paul Buchanan, PJ Moore, and Robert Bell tried to start a couple different bands, none of which took. Eventually, they became the Blue Nile and, this being the punk era, set about trying to make music with the rudimentary gear and means they had at their disposal. In a roundabout way — through their engineer Calum Malcolm — they caught the ear of a hi-fi audio equipment company called Linn Products, which was in the process of starting a record label. Their debut, 1984’s A Walk Across The Rooftops, was the first release on Linn Records. 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. In more recent years, their name seems to keep reappearing — maybe not more frequently, exactly, but perhaps a new generation is finding them. Or, as impossible as it seems for anyone to sound like the Blue Nile, maybe their influence is more significant this time around. Artists with as much history as Destroyer and as freshly exciting as Westerman have been compared to them. The 1975’s Matty Healy has talked about listening to Hats constantly while crafting last year’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships; this year, Natasha Khan, an artist obviously well-versed in the ’80s, mentioned discovering them for the first time while working on the new Bat For Lashes album Lost Girls. Pure Bathing Culture covered the entirety of Hats last year; they were joined by Ben Gibbard on a couple songs. A couple months later, fellow Scots Chvrches offered their own rendition of “The Downtown Lights.” And Buchanan still reemerges as a co-writer from time to time, most recently on Jessie Ware’s Glasshouse in 2017.a b Edwards, D. M. (31 January 2013). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops / Hats". PopMatters . Retrieved 10 March 2013.