IT is difficult to know where to begin with the Blue Nile, to do them

justice, to evaluate their worth, to garland them with praise, to get a

bit emotional and weepy, frankly. Rumours have overtaken them like weeds

during the past five album-less years. A profile that was determinedly

nebulous to begin with has become densely overgrown with conflicting

explanations for the lack of a follow-up to A Walk Across The Rooftops,

the LP of 1984, and arguably one of the albums of this or any other

decade.

Judging them by pop's usual production line standards, some critics

have confused fallow with barren, and have taken that first LP to be not

so much a landmark, more a verdigris'd tombstone.

''In a slough of artistic despond, they burned the master tapes to the

new album,'' people have said, and written. ''They don't do interviews

because it makes them look more mysterious, it's a pose,'' some have

insisted, just as others have said that they haven't given interviews

because they are ''inarticulate.''

Until very recently their public persona has indeed been low-key to

the point of invisibility, studiedly non-intrusive, you might say, at

one point taking the form of their retrieving all their publicity stills

from the press office of their parent record company, Virgin.

So how do we Blue Nile fans know anything about them, about anything?

Zen-daft though it might appear, we know it from the music. We know

everything from the music, and soon we will have new music. On September

11 there will be a new single, Downtown Lights, and on October 9 a new

album, Hats.

Virgin reckons Downtown Lights to be the best thing the group have yet

done, and confidently expect the LP to be a huge seller. ''If we can get

everyone who bought the first album to buy the new one in the first week

of its release, we will have a massive success . . . the Blue Nile will

become visibly successful rather than invisibly successful,'' I was told

by a Virgin spokesperson, who then observed that if the

(expletive-deleted) Cowboy Junkies can sell a million albums worldwide,

then surely the Blue Nile . . .

No Blue Nile fan will be disappointed with their new music, which is

much more than Rooftops, Part 2. Downtown Lights is the most obvious

descendant of their debut LP, while much of the rest of their new album

is less immediately dramatic and more subtly evocative than A Walk

Across The Rooftops. Five years in the making it may have been, and I,

for one, look forward to spending 25 years with Hats.

But who, apart from their music, are the Blue Nile, and does it matter

who they are when they just are?

We meet to thrash things out. Or rather we don't. We meet for them to

be drily absurd (''Roland Barthes is Lionel Barthes' brother . . . he

wrote Oliver and is now in Fine Young Cannibals''), and for me to be

customarily sycophantic and vague . . . dash it, I can't help feeling

that the only proper response is to thank them and then shuffle

backwards out of the room.

Robert Bell, Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore, you are, are you not,

if that's all right with you . . .

Before I can actually ask them anything, they volunteer the

information that their fave breakfast cereals are Coco Pops and

sugar-free Alpen (''originally it was Special K'').

OK, so you want to play tough . . . what was the first record you

bought?

''An LP of songs from musicals on Woolworth's own Embassy label. Very

cheap. It had The Sound of Music theme on it. Seminal stuff,'' says

Robert.

''I disown it now, but it was a sampler on the Track label with

Thunderclap Newman, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. This might be more

interesting to people: I threw it and nearly every other record in my

collection out recently. Put them in the dustbin. They were too

depressing even to take down to Oxfam. It's a lean and punchy collection

now,'' says Paul.

''It was The Age of Atlantic sampler. It had Vinegar Joe on it, before

they became unspeakably, individually famous as Elkie Brooks and Robert

Palmer, and we only bought it to test whether or not the record player

we had at home could play stereophonic recordings,'' says Paul Joseph.

What's the point of interviews? What can you tell us?

''These recent interviews have been interesting for us,'' says Paul.

''It's like plugging back in after years in the wilderness. The first

time round, when we were unknown, there was an element of evaluation.

Some of the first interviews were very confrontational: 'So just who do

you think you are?'

''We treated every interviewer equally at first, in hundreds of

interviews, which was completely knackering. We spent the whole of 1986

being busy doing the wrong thing.

''In reality, I spend most of my time being bumbling, bamboozled,

baffled, anything beginning with 'b' in fact, but for 5% of the time we

three gel and rise above ourselves and what we do is better than what we

are.

''Half a decade! I'm five years older than when I started, from a boy

to manhood. Five Christmases! I remember us going to this airless house

in Gullane at the start of 1985, to get away from things and work on the

second LP. It was like something from M. Hulot's Holiday, it was

miserable . . . it was like the Monkees gone totally wrong.

''In the last five years we didn't know or understand what was

happening to us. It was poisonous, we were unhappy, and we were not

coming up with the goods. All we knew was that if you force it, it's

never right.''

This LP, Hats, is . . .

''This LP is not dwelling on bad times.''

Music's purpose . . .

''Music speaks,'' says Paul Joseph, with an enigmatic shrug.

Your favourite colour?

''Coco Pops,'' he says, deadpan.

Like their music, the Blue Nile are incredibly charming, sometimes

difficult, affirmative, elusive, elaborate, simple, blooming brilliant.

They go to our heads and make our hearts beat stronger. What more is

there to say?