Paul is extremely disappointed at having to cancel the dates, however, he is committed to perform in Tokyo & is looking forward to re scheduling the shows in the not too distant future

POP

The Blue Nile

Hats: Deluxe Edition

[VIRGIN]

It’s difficult to pinpoint the ephemeral quality that defines “timelessness” in pop music. Since pop devours its young, and is always eager to appear hip, cool, forward-looking and in-the-moment, it tends to embrace every new technological imprint that stumbles into the room, from the heavily gated reverb that defined 1980s drum sounds to the miles-beyond-annoying auto-tuned vocal trick that leaves its scum-coated footprint all over modern radio pop and hip-hop. How can something constructed with a sell-by date in mind ever transcend its immediate milieu? Particularly when the industry that stands behind its creation doesn’t really care if it survives for posterity or not, as long as it sells a few gazillion copies in the here and now?

When Scottish trio the Blue Nile first dropped its immaculate “Hats” on the world, the year was 1989. The landscape in pop music was much like it has always been – there was fantastic, inventive music being made, and there was an awful lot of garbage, too. “Hats” didn’t sell millions, but it left an indelible mark on music by creating its own microcosmic universe. It was a sparse, subtle, hushed and dimly lit cosmos, one where singer Paul Buchanan’s yearning croon lorded over damp backstreets where jilted lovers and world-weary souls gathered to stoically mingle and perhaps drink their blues away. This was not the flash of the overly aerobicized me generation, not by a long shot. It was quietly contemplative music, ruminative and cinematic.

The opening trio of tunes heralding “Hats” – the three-whiskeys-in gorgeous bummer “Over the Hillside,” the longing-infused “The Downtown Lights,” and the achingly elegaic “Let’s Go Out Tonight” – confirmed the album as a masterpiece before it even reached midpoint. Buchanan’s vocals – raw emotion sitting front and center, sometimes disconcerting in their honesty – are buoyed by supple guitars, sympathetic synths, the most minimal of rhythm section pulses. There are no wasted notes, nor is there unwarranted and unwanted flab in the arrangements. All bow before the narrative flow, which proceeds elegantly toward a dark night of the soul. There is a relentless sense of the narrator’s loneliness amid crowds. There is also the suggestion that the narrator will search in vain for a fulfillment that will never be his. His fate is to wander through the nightlife embracing ghosts, repeating the action with Sisyphus-like determination, pushed onward by the curse of hope and the cursed indomitability of dreams.

Here in its pristinely remastered and expanded form – a second disc adds alternate vocal takes, live-in-the-studio run-throughs and unreleased songs from the original sessions – “Hats” stands as a transcendently eloquent collection of sophisticated pop songs. It’s an ode to understatement, and to the foggy beauty of loss. This music was built to last.

– Jeff Miers

Finally, A Walk Across The Rooftops is BBC 6Music’s ‘Album Of The Week’ next week so expect a track a day from the album.

Still a landmark, still high, still somehow intangible: The Blue Nile didn’t sound or function like any normal band.

1984’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.

Now remastered (for once, the sound being both brittle and big, that null word has value) and reissued with added rarities (as is its sublime 1989 successor, Hats), its hopeful melancholy transcends its era like an Edward Hopper painting. Synthesisers, the 80s’ new toy, abound, but are used with such naïve grace, over rhythms both simple and circuitous, that they refuse to date.

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.

People tend to flag up The Blue Nile’s Scottishness, as if geography and accidents of birth were responsible for artistic vision; but surely, again like Hopper, the dreams and tears here are universal. The city streets, cars, rooftops, rain, couples and love documented and expressed so delicately throughout the seven songs are potentially everywhere, any time, “caught up in this big rhythm”. This is why the band stood out then and hover above now; both everymen and angels.

With the bubbling, chugging, almost unbearably yearning Tinsel town in the Rain (“I know now, love was so exciting”) following the opening title track, the album is within minutes an epic noir movie, despite its modesty. The white-funk guitar line that breaks into the latter is a marvel of rule-breaking juxtaposition.

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.