Blue Nile Poll: A Walk Across The Rooftops or Hats?

AWATR

^

Hats!

Phew, I was sensing a shutout--Hats is sounding pretty incredible right now

One more vote for Hats. I recall that when it was issued (back in the long-box days) it had blurbs from George Harrison and Phil Collins on the cover. I bought it anyway.

Said this many moons ago on another thread and still agree for the most part:

The Blue Nile leave me strangely cold. All the elements are there: memorable tunes, engaging electronic productions, Buchanan's sultry voice. For all intents and purposes, this is a band I ought to worship — one that clearly many people do.

Yet I don't. I haven't listened to either record in a while now, but every time I do, I sort of shrug and can't figure out the empty feeling they leave me with.

But as I think about it, I wonder if it's something's amiss with their aims. Fans rave about The Blue Nile's "passion" and "intensity." And while I can at least embrace the idea that doesn't always signify Aretha-like caterwauling, there's a def. sense that they mistake simplicity for transcendence, which has the effect of producing banality. Particularly on Hats, which trades early 80s futurism for late 80s MOR (not in and of itself an unworthy proposition), there are moments that must have made Phil Collins feel positively vindicated.

I mean, as craftsmen I respect The Blue Nile — they make a flawless, perfectly executed product. But as artists, they seem burdened by a complete lack of self-awareness.

i just left a dollar copy of Hats at a record store. i really should have picked it up, but i was trying to not buy anymore records and i already have it on cd. my old boss gave it to me because he said it reminded him of an old boyfriend and it was too painful to listen to anymore. i might have to go back to the store later in the week to pick it up.

I wrote this about A Walk Across The Rooftops recently, it kinda measures my thoughts on the two albums in passing:

Fourteen was mostly a lonely time for me music-wise. While classmates tended to be united by the purported greatness of The Smashing Pumpkins, The Offspring, Green Day and (inexplicably and perhaps unexcusably) Silverchair's "Cemetary", and my close friends and I would rate each new single from the Spice Girls, the vast majority of my music absorption during this period was conducted alone and in the absence of any discussion or debate. Like feeling your way through a labyrinthine network of caves in total darkness, approaching music with no idea of (let alone regard for) notions of genre, reputation or fashion can lead you down as many wrong turns as interesting detours, but if briefly imagining I liked Big Country and Ben Folds FIve was the price of discovering My Bloody Valentine and The Prodigy and Joni Mitchell and The Comsat Angels and Aphex Twin and Maria McKee and Depeche Mode, regret would be churlish as well as pointless.

The unreasoning diversity of discovery at this age is something I look back on with fondness: already, I was trying to frame in quasi-critical terms why I liked what I listened to, but there was little if any pre-existing framework applied to each new crush, resulting in a music-listening ethic (if we can be so pretentious) high on intensity but very low on snobbery. This was lucky, because it's difficult to imagine a teenager with any kind of judgmental aesthetic framework at all ever embracing The Blue Nile.

I still don't really know the full story of The Blue Nile, except what follows: supremely unprolific 1980s Scottish trio who made two albums of perfectionist, expansionist, bittersweet, unfashionably adult sounding and (let's not quibble) basically life-changing studio-pop in 1983 and 1989, and then a couple more over the next 15 or so years, a work rate which only heightens the air of connoisseurialism that hangs over the band like a velvet shroud. The two albums to care about came first: the 1983 debut A Walk Across the Rooftops, and the 1989 follow-up Hats. I use "studio-pop" rather than "synth-pop" because the connotations of the latter term will lead you in the wrong direction: yes, The Blue Nile used synthesisers, and lots of them. But they presaged the mid-80s obsession with making synthesisers sound like (or, at most, augment) real things rather than synthesisers, which places them closer to a mix of Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love and Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants To Rule the World" with a dash of The Dream Academy, rather than, say, the Human League. This in and of itself isn't an obviously good thing: that plasticky faux-realness of the mid-to-late 80s remains difficult to rehabilitate even now, whereas primitive synth-pop's rough robotocism is now once again pop music's lingua franca. But The Blue Nile did it better than anyone else.

On A Walk Across the Rooftops, the sound is shockingly stark, disorienting, perfect like a bare tree in winter: weary-sounding programmed drums, eerie keyboard washes in the distance, rippling harps and mournful horn lines, sudden and entrancing interweavings of found sound, lilting piano vamps, pristine and precise guitar solos worthy of Lindsay Buckingham, and a mass of synthetic strings, now pizzicato, now sweeping. At times - on the heady romantic flush of "Tinseltown in the Rain", the yearning "Stay" and the chintzy but gorgeous "Heatwave" - the sound resembles a refined, defiantly middle-aged and somewhat shy disco, as if Robert Wyatt had chosen to cover Chic's "I Want Your Love" rather than "At Last I Am Free", or as if Spandau Ballet's "True" had been given over to Peter Gabriel, or as if Steely Dan were Europeans and had recorded Aja with Brian Eno. At times - on the dazzling "From Rags to Riches" and the devastating closer "Automobile Noise" - the songs are deconstructed into a glittering maze of interlocking riffs and tones and patterns and rhythms, recalling only Steve Reich and the other secret Reich-pop of the era (Kate Bush's "Mother Stands For Comfort", Japan's "Ghosts", Jane Siberry's best eighties output).

Equally as if not more important than the crystalline arrangements are the vocals and lyrics of Paul Buchanan: grizzled and wisened beyond his years, Buchanan's slightly tremulous baritone always evokes a man who has come to romance (and its attendant traumas) late in life and later than he ever expected to find it; his expressions simple, his voice suggesting this simplicity has been carefully honed, like a cliff face shaped by the elements. The chorus of "Tinseltown in the Rain" is a circling dialogue of crippling doubt and passionate affirmation: "Do I love you? Yes I love you. Will we always be happy go lucky? Do I love you? Yes, I love you. But it's easy come, and it's easy go... All this talking, talking... is only bravado." On "Stay", the injunction placed on a relationship's disintegration is artlessly, disarmingly straightforward and all-encompassing: "Stay. Stay. Stay. I will understand you..." "Automobile Noise" catalogues the smallest details of a city ("automobile noise, exit signs and subway trains. Twenty four hours. Statues in the rain") as if to underscore the singer's sense of disconnection from all of it, the interminable numbness of a failed relationship's post-mortem ("the heat of the moment, then the unwinding of it all..."), a fog from within which reality is regarded as a persistent intruder.

The Blue Nile certainly weren't the first avowedly romantic music I liked, but they were the first to make me think about romance as an aesthetic, as a kind of creative space that could be inhabited because you liked it's formal contours rather than just a kind of expressive verisimilitude with real life emotions. The Blue Nile's songs seem to be about real, concrete relationships, but they don't invite comparison with your own experiences; they're tearjerkers, but ultimately the tears are not shed for anything in particular. The magic of (in particular) "Tinseltown in the Rain" for me at fourteeen was the surprise that anyone could have so effectively bottled so much emotion as a kind of reusable, all-purpose readymade, in blatant disregard of its actual transience and specificity. In this regard, the album (or my experience of it at any rate) prefigured and helped provide a framework for so much later dance music, R&B, really any music where the love of love is raised to the level of fetish.

If anything, their second album Hats does this even better: simpler, but more lush as well, with every unnecessary element gently sanded away and filled in with a kind of luminous vibrancy, a contentless longing with the intensity of ozone. It's hard to think of music more sheerly perfect than "The Downtown Lights" or "Saturday Night". But A Walk Across The Rooftops is the weirder record, and importantly, it came first, for them and for me. As such, while Hats springs into being seemingly fully-formed and undeconstructible, the debut more completely lays bare the creative process. You can hear how "From Rags to Riches" has been constructed, layer upon layer, until it shimmers like a mirage on the horizon. Or at least, in 1996 (a full thirteen years after the album's release) I could hear this, and it made me want to get inside the creative process, to understand the hows and whys of their deployment of such a monumental vision. It's a shame that The Blue Nile never became pop svengalis (though they later did some work with Rickie Lee Jones and Annie Lennox I believe) because they would have been brilliant at it, a kind of 80s white suburban equivalent of The-Dream - "let me take your expressions of love and longing and make them seem bigger and more powerful than you ever possibly imagined."

I got a cheap copy of "Hats" back in, naturally impressed by the quality of the pressing for a kickoff...

Also, what TimF said about 'space' is right.

I can't recall much of "Rooftops", I did get a CD cheap some years later (I think I posted when I got it, some place here)

So, does this come down to "whichever one you got/heard first" once again?

And would that account for the tailing off of the 'appreciation' of them in general?

Does Headlights On The Parade Ground sound like a pretty straight rewrite of a Kraftwerk song to anybody else? I think it's Neon Lights from Man Machine, but definitely something off that lp.

"A Walk Across The Rooftops", although I like "Hats" too. Haven't been too keen on whatever they have done after those two.

I went for A Walk Across The Rooftops but they are both complete classics.

This is still my favourite song they've ever done, I kind of wish it was on the Rooftops but I'm not sure it would fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlcmY63aEI

<3 that song, so much

What I love about "Hats" is its overwhelming melancholy despite (from memory) a minimal reliance on moody minor chords. It's a neat trick.

I should stress that this album is still moody as hell, but I can always see the sun poking out from behind the clouds! Bummed when we got the tease of a tour a couple of years ago, before it was abruptly cancelled.

They're both gorgeous, timeless albums. Peace at Last is great too, and unfairly maligned.

both are exquisite... with hats coming out tops for me..

i ALWAYS see Hats in vinyl bargain bins - and its one of those records I feel like buying and just pressing into the hands of a stranger and saying 'you need this'.. It's one of the least deserving bargain bin records i've ever seen.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i went back and picked up Hats from the dollar bin the next day - i couldn't stop thinking about it (along w/a michael franks album, who i think fans of blue nile should be fans of tbh). awatr and hats are kind of equal in my eyes, almost interchangeable, but since i've spent more time w/rooftops, i'm voting that.

Hats. Just shades it though.

it's more a silhouette than a shade.

I prefer the former, most seem to prefer the latter

I thought it was the other way round!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Nice. It's just about that close, but I went with the debut because it seemed like such a revelation when I heard it in late 1984.

Very cool! Thanks for voting y'all

What I love about "Hats" is its overwhelming melancholy despite (from memory) a minimal reliance on moody minor chords. It's a neat trick.

Most of the chords on that album are sort of jazz-influenced and sort of "impressionist", no? You are right there are few minor chords, but also few straight major chords.

I bought a really nice copy of Hats on vinyl today. Listening now...if you haven't heard this on a nice turntable setup, try to....this is impossibly gorgeous

'Rooftops' really needs to be reissued with "I Love This Life" added. The best I can imagine a song so titled--without an apparent trace of irony--could be.

I've been listening to these albums a lot recently due to his solo album being so great. Voted for Rooftops at the time but think I'd go with Hats now, it's very close though as they're both so perfect. It's like trying to pick between Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock in that Talk Talk poll.

hats for me, just because I've heard it a lot more that rooftops. want to find a vinyl copy.

The Blue Nile continued to record without success until they were approached by Charlie Brennan, a representative of Scottish audio equipment company Linn Hi-Fi. Engineers at Linn had become frustrated by the poor quality of the test LPs that were provided for their flagship turntable product, so they manufactured their own cutting lathe and were looking for local artists to provide recordings to demonstrate the quality of their new equipment.[3] The track the band recorded was "Tinseltown in the Rain" (a tribute to their home town), which impressed the company so much that they agreed to finance an entire album, which became the first release on their new record label, Linn Records. It reached #80 in the UK album charts.

Interesting. and not surprising that these records sound so great.

I wrote this in another thread:

The Blue Nile leave me strangely cold. All the elements are there: memorable tunes, engaging electronic productions, Buchanan's sultry voice. For all intents and purposes, this is a band I ought to worship — one that clearly many people do.

Yet I don't. I haven't listened to either record in a while now, but every time I do, I sort of shrug and can't figure out the empty feeling they leave me with.

But as I think about it, I wonder if it's something's amiss with their aims. Fans rave about The Blue Nile's "passion" and "intensity." And while I can at least embrace the idea that doesn't always signify Aretha-like caterwauling, there's a def. sense that they mistake simplicity for transcendence, which has the effect of producing banality. Particularly on Hats, which trades early 80s futurism for late 80s MOR (not in and of itself an unworthy proposition), there are moments that must have made Phil Collins feel positively vindicated.

I mean, as craftsmen I respect The Blue Nile — they make a flawless, perfectly executed product. But as artists, they seem burdened by a complete lack of self-awareness.

...and I think I still agree with it. Yet for some reason, I never totally give up.

i was sort of wanting to write a piece about the blue nile lately and of course i encounter tim's totally otm post upthread

a kind of 80s white suburban equivalent of The-Dream

omfg

i'm listening to some b-sides and oh man, "i love this life", "regret", and "o lolita" are all incredible

i'm listening to some b-sides and oh man, "i love this life", "regret", and "o lolita" are all incredible

Are the b-sides collected somewhere, on a compilation maybe?

My post upthread is probably the most OTM I have been about anything ever.

it's def one of my favorite things you've ever written

every time i've tried to write about the blue nile in the past few years i've had a moment where i'm like "fuck i'm just rewriting tim's post"

was there any relation or sense of commonality between Blue Nile and Talk Talk at the time, either with bands themselves of w/writers? Very different in some ways but there's some sense that they are mining the same ground in two different ways

oh btw i have a bootleg collection of the b sides and will send it to whoever wants it when i get back to my computer tonight

btw as amazing as AWATR is, the answer is hats

Mr. Nelson, that would be fantastic.

I bought both records in the late 1990s, and for years I preferred Hats.

These days, I definitely think Rooftops is the superior album. I couldn't really articulate why though.

Automobile Noise is some track to play on the headphones when you're out for a walk at night.

That is great stuff upthread by Tim btw.

One small correction though – Rooftops came out in 1984 not 1983 (though it was recorded in 1983).