the blue nile: hats

^^ more than enough to get me interested. Only heard abt Blue Nile's album through ilx last week, and Hollis was on my mind frequently.

album is called Mid Air

Listened to the title track of that and it reminded me of Lewis - L'amour

"Seven A.M." because it goes down a storm with just about any combination of Sade's "Make Some Room," the dub mix of Mr. Fingers' "What About This Love," M.E./Virgo's "School Hall," and the Arthur Baker "Rapid Eye" remix of Will Downing's "In My Dreams."

saturday night/quarter to five/when the storefronts are closed in paradise/meet me outside the cherry light

I love the meticulous productions of Talk Talk and David Sylvian's solo work, but I've never got on with The Blue Nile. I can't deny that the production on this record is great, but whenever I've listened to it I've often found my attention wavering very quickly. 'Let's Go Out Tonight' is a great example of a song that I switch off from long before the end.

Listened to the title track of that and it reminded me of Lewis - L'amour

― Evan, Monday, October 3, 2016 7:52 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok wow...

George Costanza: "If this is a lie, if this is a joke, if this is your idea of some cute little game, we're finished ...

:(

At the office through laptop speakers so maybe that is a dumb comparison.

For example I thought those were synth pads behind his voice and piano. Realizing they're not.

Saturday night obv

yup

yeah "saturday night" is the one that i've been most obsessed with, when the strings come in a little over halfway through the song it's just game over, music doesn't get much better than that

"From A Late Night Train" is imo as sublime as it gets

reminds me of Aztec Camera!

not exactly my bag in general, but will say the singer reminds me a bit of Adrian Belew

Noooooooooo

I would have thought that Let's Go Out Tonight might be a front-runner, but from the comments, maybe not. Anyway, it gets my vote, but all are great.

A lot of people seem to prefer the Craig Armstrong cover (on which Buchanan sings), but I think Hats remains the definitive version. Second place goes to Isaac Hayes version…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vuy0QJ0BA

Evan, all I meant was I want you to be right. I want it to sound like Lewis. And it does. Nothing dumb about it.

Oh, totally misread you then! I'm often a little too worried about offending those who are closer to an artist than I am. New to the Blue Nile myself but liked that solo track much more.

dude holy shit that isaac hayes cover of "let's go out tonight" !!

Oh, totally misread you then! I'm often a little too worried about offending those who are closer to an artist than I am. New to the Blue Nile myself but liked that solo track much more.

― Evan, Monday, October 3, 2016 9:58 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't say I was too clear with Seinfeld reference tbh. Just really, really wished your Lewis reference was on point. And it was.

yeah "saturday night" is the one that i've been most obsessed with, when the strings come in a little over halfway through the song it's just game over, music doesn't get much better than that

― k3vin k., Monday, October 3, 2016 7:00 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I was coming here to say that "saturday night" has the slightest of edges because the string refrain from the 3 and half minute mark is like two lovers walking towards each other on a city bridge.

also it's my "song i would sing on Idol or equiv" song.

"saturday night" is my vote

http://www.primlifestyles.com/wp-content/plugins/RSSPoster_PRO/cache/c9820_Beyonce-Formation-4.gif

most inexplicable discovery from the 5 favorite albums thread, never heard of this, had no idea so many people held it so dear.
― flappy bird, Monday, October 3, 2016 12:31 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya me neither

shouts out to my favorite lyric ever though: "in love we're all the same / we're walking down an empty street"

god that isaac hayes cover

this album was a big deal in my house growing up. My mother is the kind of woman who buys a CD every year - Will Young, Daniel Bedingfield, Ronan Keating - and her then-partner was a Britpop man who also loved dance music. But they both would say this is their favourite album of all time.

I've probably said this before in any number of ILX posts over the years, but one thing that really stands out about The Blue Nile is the reverent or hymnal quality of their songwriting and production, the sense that the songs are gesturing toward something much larger than the band and their private concerns; certainly these songs never feel autobiographical (regardless of whether they in fact are or not, and notwithstanding the recurrent sonic and lyrical motifs which form the group's indelible imprint).

It's rare to find music so personal, so singular, that is not also idiosyncratic in the strong sense of that word, not irrevocably bound up with the personality of its creator(s). Certainly when I think about 80s pop it feels like a lot of material falls on either side of that line, either deeply personal or thoroughly universal; The Blue Nile's songs feel like a communication from one frame of reference to the other.

Kate Bush produced two songs which also walk this tightrope, I think ("Running Up That Hill", "This Woman's Work"). But only two.

With The Blue Nile it's just what they do.

Which is one reason why the band is so routinely covered by other artists relative to their general obscurity.

"Seven A.M." because it goes down a storm with just about any combination of Sade's "Make Some Room," the dub mix of Mr. Fingers' "What About This Love," M.E./Virgo's "School Hall," and the Arthur Baker "Rapid Eye" remix of Will Downing's "In My Dreams."

so much perfect music in one sentence

yeah i would pay ten dollars just to sit somewhere and hear that run, and i'm really poor.

Booming post Tim

That reverent spirit is probably what triggers thoughts of a kinship with talk talk.

Also the feeling of longing which is so distilled it becomes religious and romantic at the same time

yep, and it's romance of a religious order, something you walk through with its own weather and texture, a weighted experience. every feeling almost having an architectural significance, as if they were individual buildings in a city you're walking through

a lot of this is in the form of address of buchanan's lyrics; it's never really a monologue, it mostly seems to be one end of a conversation, whether he's having that conversation with a person or the feeling of that person

with this framing it's a lot less jarring that peace at last ended up being often literally devotional

Was jamming "Sentimental Man" this morning.

the last minute of "downtown lights" :O

― k3vin k.

Yeah, this is one of my favourite moments in music. The way he sings, "I'm tired of crying on the stairs" and then belts out the title gets me every single time.

buchanan's latest solo album has some really great lyrics. he's still very much an interesting lyricist.

Are you talking about Mid Air or did the new one come out?

yeah mid air

Went with 'The Downtown Lights' but holy hell what a ridiculously difficult choice.

i should go back & listen to this again. i remember not being bowled over when tim got me to listen to it years back, but "saturday night" was instantly stunning

i am gonna have to think about it but this album has one of music's greatest one-two punches. so much so i often just play "hillside" and "downtown" on repeat.

sort of worried that "let's go out tonight" isn't getting its due

on first listen i think it might be my fav

the first lines got me. heavy springsteen vibes.

Seven AM cos the last 2 minutes are the best sounding recording of anything ever. so much going on

stoppp, go, stopppp, go, cos i .. doontknoooow

(Saturday Night is probably really my vote but I didnt want to jump on the wagon)

the first lines got me. heavy springsteen vibes.

the springsteen connection feels explicit on high oddly enough, it's one of the few records that's ever reminded me of tunnel of love. "i would never" has the kind of stately delivery of "tougher than the rest" and the same melancholic shadow to its lyrics

I want to like this record a lot but right now I'm having trouble getting past the particularly dated 80s instrumental arrangements/ingredients and relentlessly gloomy vibe. Or maybe not the right kind of gloomy (I normally love gloominess). This is probably a problem I have with certain 80s stylings. I love late Talk Talk and Gigi Masin etc. so maybe I should stick to looking for a way to check out Mid Air in its entirety instead.

Afterglow is not a word I would I associate with a late night bus from George Square in Glasgow tbh.

one thing i've always puzzled over is the emotion that seems to be attached to all of the images of city lights, empty streets and cars going by. they always seem to be references to some kind of anchor point or manifestation of love and beauty in the context of a relationship - all of "let's go out tonight" seems to be that way. so i think a crucial part of this album is the subject of a grand love, and maybe romance itself. it's a very romantic album at its core, i think. so the other day it struck me that the city landscape that it occupies, which you describe so beautifully and thoroughly jordan, that maybe all of those images are stand-ins for transcendental love. i think of the rush of words at the end of "the downtown lights," it almost sounds like he's being crucified on them. there's the lyric "in love we're all the same / we're walking down an empty street." also i think references to friday and saturday are symbolic of romance and love in a similar way (and also part of the working class thing - fridays and saturdays being these weekly moments of possibility for working people). but these images aren't what usually get brought out as symbols for love - they're all ghostly, unoccupied, and transitory. there's a contradiction and a melancholy there. the generalness of romance and love rising above and away from the particularities of a person. i do find a certain truth to that. and ultimately it just feels saturated with hope for love and for romance in spite of the transitory and ghostly aspects of it, it's an album-length prayer for it.

ultimately it just feels saturated with hope for love and for romance in spite of the transitory and ghostly aspects of it, it's an album-length prayer for it.

i also think it implies that there is some value in that transitory period, that there is something itself romantic about melancholic longing. as a gay person this perspective feels very natural and comfortable to me... one coping mechanism for being in the closet is finding something meaningful and even special in your relationship to love and romance in that transitory period. of being the ghost. the album never resolves, and instead chooses to luxuriate in that in between

I think if one steps back from this album specifically, it's easier to see how Buchanan was invested in telling the same type of story (both in content and in form) over and over again.

"A Walk Across The Rooftops" (the song, which is the opening song on their first album) opens with:

I walk across the rooftops
I follow a broken Thread
Of white rags falling slowly down
Flags caught on the fences
I am in love, I am in love with you
I am in love, I am in love with you

This is a lyrical set piece we see over and over again, this intensely visual first-person description of moving through empty urban spaces like an archeologist, taking in everything but judging nothing, every detail pregnant with possibility but detached from any fixed signification - and then the shift to the simplest, most direct statement of romantic attachment possible. And the narrator and the listener both realise that this is the point, the vantage from which the world around has become both enlivened and estranged, lit up in the most intoxicating manner possible.

And so Buchanan encapsulates a certain aspect of love, which is the way it colours and transforms everything around it like sunlight (or city lights); and as with the sun, the actual detail of love is something that Buchanan can only gaze at directly for a moment before looking away, describing the source of this feeling in only the simplest terms before once again returning his gaze to a study of its effects.

Then, "Tinseltown in the Rain":

Why did we ever come so far?
I knew I'd seen it all before
Tall buildings reach up in vain
Tinseltown is in the rain
I know now love was so exciting
Tinseltown in the rain
All men and women
Here we are
Caught up in this big rhythm
One day this love will all blow over
Time for leaving the parade
Is there a place in this city
A place to always feel this way?

Archeology: the singer observes the seeming permanence of the city, the "tall buildings (which) reach up in vain" for the heavens, knowing that even these monuments are themselves fleeting if one zooms out far enough, but in the moment their permanence feels assured. And he wonders if this big emotion that is bursting out of him can last - is there a place in this city to always feel this way? Hoping that it can, fearing that it can't.

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 is only bravado, yeah

Is this feeling real, can it last? And if it doesn't, would that make the way I feel now any less real?

just wanna say this has been a very enjoyable revive so far, some really great posts here

Yeah. Feeling this revive pretty hard

yeah love this discussion

“saturday night” is going to to be the closing song at my wedding

Killer choice.

This was the perfect soundtrack for my walk around rainy Vienna this afternoon.

Pray for me, praying for the light
Baby, baby, let's go out tonight

The wishful thinking/hoping/praying/begging of this album transports me through all different periods of my adult life.

i was worried about listening to this again after i broke up with someone a month ago. i have a burned cd of it in my car and every time i flip past it i wince. i'm just sitting around alone with my cat this afternoon and decided to put it on and ... it's definitely not ruined lol. 'over the hillside' moved me to tears as it does, not for the loss of someone or some thing, but for the insane ecstatic existence of love itself. so i'm just sitting here listening to this thing filled with gratitude.

You need to listen to Bête Noire stat.

what

The Ferry album with the closest mood to Hats.

ah gotcha

i think now is the time for more ferry in my life.

i was worried about listening to this again after i broke up with someone a month ago. i have a burned cd of it in my car and every time i flip past it i wince. i'm just sitting around alone with my cat this afternoon and decided to put it on and ... it's definitely not ruined lol. 'over the hillside' moved me to tears as it does, not for the loss of someone or some thing, but for the insane ecstatic existence of love itself. so i'm just sitting here listening to this thing filled with gratitude.

― five six seven, eight nine ten, begin (map), Saturday, May 17, 2025 2:50 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hope you’re doing ok map. and I am biased, because it’s when I first discovered this album, but right after a breakup seems like the perfect time to listen to this record

hey thanks k3vin. i'm doing well :). that's cool to hear that you discovered this after a breakup.

Only love will survive.

(Straight line from Donne's The Relic to Larkin's An Arundel Tomb to Headlights on the Parade.)

thankfully i have a lot of love in my life.

xp oh that's cool! i've got to check those out.

<3 map

:)

it's only love that gets you through

map, just wanted to cosign and say hey. always enjoy your insightful postings.

hats was pleasant from a distance until the summer after i got divorced and was living alone for the first time ever. i checked out the band because of their glowing reputation among critics (mainly amg+trouser press), but all that praise finally started making more sense after that. haven't really looked back since, of course.

i can't see the future, but it seems unlikely that this album will ever sound anything except comforting to me.

I love this album but the debut is still my go-to Blue Nile as it hit me at just the right moment in high school and "Hats" came out right after I graduated college.

I want to thank ILX because I had never heard of the Blue Nile until this thread blew up with the vinyl reissues and I bought them all unheard. They’re a beautiful band and running into a Blue Nile fan in the wild feels extremely special.

I want to thank ILX because I had never heard of the Blue Nile until this thread blew up with the vinyl reissues and I bought them all unheard. They’re a beautiful band and running into a Blue Nile fan in the wild feels extremely special.

i love ‘hats’ deeply but find it difficult to listen to sometimes, just the emotional overwhelm of it all. it’s not really something i can just casually listen to or have on in the background.

bete noire is great - thanks alfred.