Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Hats, by The Blue Nile.


YOU don’t have to look too far to find evidence of the powerful emotional impact that the music of The Blue Nile has had on people.

In journalist Allan Brown’s book, Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile, an Australian fan recalls reading, all of 35 years ago, a review of the band’s second album, Hats, in his girlfriend’s magazine as she got ready for a night out. Together they made a quick detour to a record shop, where he bought the album. He was already hooked on it.

“The relationship”, he writes, “didn’t last but the album has. It remains quite possibly my favourite ... From the opening beats that start the album, I can still smell her perfume”.

On the messages section of the website of the band’s singer and songwriter, Paul Buchanan, one fan tells Buchanan that his music “has helped me through countless tough times and happy ones too”. Another fan, in Australia, says: “I struggle to think of creative work that has offered me solace, comfort and friendship like your music has”. On the band’s Facebook page, someone observes: “The memories of hearing Walk Across the Rooftops for the first time, actually makes me weep”.

In the meantime, demand for vinyl reissues of the Glasgow band’s four albums remains strong. The music made by Buchanan, PJ Moore and Robert Bell in the course of four albums means an awful lot to an awful lot of people.

Their startling 1984 debut, A Walk Across The Rooftops (which is reputed to have influenced the sound of Phil Collins’s Eighties output), won rapturous reviews. “Nocturnal atmospherics” was an expression that was used more than once. “... Some music to shade your dreamtime in subtle colours, a quiet influence, delicious persuasion”, said the music weekly, NME, adding that it evoked “romance, doubt, a rich sadness. The keynote is restraint; far from straining for effect, The Blue Nile allow their music to find its own atmosphere”. The album was “a sleeper that bridged the gap between synthesizer-pop and soft guitar rock as no one had done before”, wrote a New York Times critic six years later, on the occasion of the release of the follow-up album, Hats.

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Many now regard Hats, released here in 1989, as the band’s masterpiece. Tender, heartfelt, melodic and exquisite, it is a quietly magnificent piece of work, one that truly repays repeated listenings.

There are seven tracks here: Over the Hillside, The Downtown Lights, Let’s Go Out Tonight, Headlights on the Parade, From a Late Night Train, Seven a.m., and Saturday Night. To quote from that same New York Times article: “Floating on oceans of synthesizer and spare percussion, the seven songs have a dense moodiness that approaches solipsism. ‘The Downtown Lights’ is as panoramic as a twilight view of Manhattan, ‘Over the Hillside’ as misty and sad as an empty road through a rain-soaked windshield. The lead singer Paul Buchanan’s voice has a trembling shyness, like that of someone who has trouble speaking in groups; his oblique lyrics about love and loneliness reach for the unsure child in the hearts of listeners”.

Writing in Q magazine, Johnny Black made the point that the tempos on the album were, for the most part, “hypnotically slow. Sparse drums, the barest skeletons of structure sketched in on tinkling pianos, occasional pastel washes of synthetic strings, and Paul Buchanan’s haunted voice carrying fragile strands of melody that melt away into the backdrop before you’ve quite grasped them. It sounds as if they spent five years deciding how much they could leave out and still have enough meat and bone to allow the songs to stand up”.

Buchanan, Moore and Bell, however, lit up when NME journalist Stuart Maconie told them, over a meal in a Glasgow rooftop restaurant in 1989, that he found it a “wildly optimistic record”.

The trio broke into wide smiles. “That’s great”, responded Robert Bell. “We wanted to make a hopeful record. The first LP was hopeful but with an edge of desperation. This one is more colourful. Though it has got similar locales and emotions.”

Hats, by The Blue NileHats, by The Blue Nile (Image: free)

The fifth track, the achingly sad From a Late Night Train, remains for many people the classic Blue Nile song. If you have been through a break-up and struggled to cope - and who hasn’t? - this song will forever speak to you.

“It’s over now/I know it’s over/But I can’t let go”, Buchanan recounts over a barely-there musical backdrop that includes trumpet. Glimpses of other people’s lives going on as normal only accentuate the sadness and despair: “From a late-night train/the little towns go rolling by/and people in the stations going home/It’s over now/I know it’s over/But I love you so”.

Play the song on the official Blue Nile channel on YouTube and read some of the bruised responses from listeners: “Anybody that has been in a relationship and thought it would be for ever can really resonate with this achingly beautiful track”; “so unbelievably sad and evocative”; “I think this is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. This song hits a chord with anyone that truly listens to it, It’s just brilliant”.

Then there’s this comment, made six years ago, “I think of her everytime I hear this song, she truly broke my heart”. And this one, from two years ago: “Fantastic – brings a tear to my eye, reminds of the girl I thought I would grow old with and that’s 34 years ago, still miss her. it’s over now”.

“They make incredibly simple-sounding, emotional records about the stuff that fascinates them. And they’re very good at it”, David Quantick concluded in his NME review of Hats, all those years ago. He is right. Hats continues to mesmerise new listeners, some of them doubtless pulled in its direction by Taylor Swift name-checking them in her recent song, Guilty as Sin? and causing a stampede for their vinyl albums.

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There would, after Hats, be only be two Blue Nile albums - Peace at Last, in 1996, and High, in 2004. Buchanan released a solo project, Mid Air, in 2012; PJ Moore & Co (Moore, Malcolm Lindsay and Mike McKenzie) brought out When a Good Day Comes, in 2022. Both are essential listening for fans of the band.

There is, online, a fair degree of Blue Nile audio, video and interview material, the concert footage including a Glastonbury gig from 1997 and, from January this year, Buchanan’s appearance at a memorable Celtic Connections date at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall - the very hall where the trio made two landmark appearances in back in September 1990. The reception accorded Buchanan when he walked onto the stage that January night was remarkable in its intensity, which is no more than he - and his erstwhile colleagues, Robert Bell and PJ Moore - deserve.

Hats was remade in its entirety in 2018 by the US indie band, Pure Bathing Culture (available on Spotify, and worth a listen), and its legions of fans include Elbow's Guy Garvey, and The 1975.

Not for nothing did Herald readers, that same year, vote Hats as Scotland's favourite album. A Walk Across the Rooftops came in at number four. "It’s the album I always return to; just something about the memories and emotions it always conjures up", one reader said of Hats.

A Herald colleague was quickly on the phone to Paul Buchanan to pass on the news. “What a lovely, wonderful thing, I’m genuinely astonished,” he said. “I’d honestly never have thought Hats would have done this. It’s so gratifying and very humbling, especially since there are so many fantastic albums on the list. Scotland's musical landscape is so fertile.

“At a personal level there’s something redemptive in knowing that so many people love Hats - after all, you have so many moments of doubt in your life. The important thing for us when we were making the record was to stay out of the way of the music, to let people react to it in their own way rather than us attaching our personalities to it, and I hope we achieved that.”

* Listen to our essential playlist on Spotify. And tell us what you think of Hats and the tracks we have chosen for the playlist.

Next week: Heaven or Las Vegas, by Cocteau Twins.