A Walk Across The Rooftops

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Almost four decades later, despite their best efforts, people do think about The Blue Nile, and their debut remains widely revered, a testimony to this discreet, inspired band’s dedication and determination. In June 1996, seven years after Hats, the Blue Nile released a third album, entitled Peace at Last. It displayed a marked difference in style to the first two albums, with Buchanan's acoustic guitar work more to the fore. Buchanan recalled that he had bought the guitar in a New York music shop, and by coincidence Robert Bell had seen the guitar earlier the same day and called Buchanan to tell him about it. [16] A gospel choir made a brief appearance on the first single, " Happiness". Despite the release of Peace at Last on a major label, critical reaction to the album was more mixed than for the band's previous records, [4] although sales were good, entering the UK album chart at #13. In 1981, the band recorded their debut single, the cheerful but still restrained I Love This Life. It was soon passed on to RSO Records, home to the Bee Gees, by Calum Malcolm, a young engineer. The first two Blue Nile albums have a similar haunting quality that shows no sign of becoming dated. For those of us who lived there at the time, they are also a welcome reminder that there was more to 1980s Britain than very bad haircuts and the brutally awful Thatcher government.

From his perspective, Tiefenbrun later pointed out admiringly, “Nothing would persuade them to do anything other than what they were doing,” but the band have disputed their reputation for perfectionism. Rudden, Bernard (director) (1991). Flags and Fences (television documentary). Virgin Records Media Ltd./ BBC Scotland. 15:38 minutes in.It became apparent during the recording of High that old tensions among the band members had resurfaced. Buchanan's comments in a 2012 interview seemed to indicate that the album was finished out of a sense of duty and loyalty rather than any willingness to do so. "When we eventually finished High, I don't think it was bristling with the same joy and naivety we'd felt when we started. We'd gathered ourselves long enough to make it. It seemed to me a stoic record, to some extent a record about ourselves, though I didn't realise that 'til later. It was a collected and fairly stoic record which I was proud of and, in a sense, we just made ourselves focus. We showed up, we went into the room and worked, and whatever drift had set in we were loyal to each other and we knew we had to form the wagons into a circle." [16] Lining up side by side in a tiny rectangular room in a Glasgow flat, they began to develop their skills and songs. “I wouldn’t say it was punk,” Buchanan told Popmatters, “but it was certainly boho. We rehearsed the whole album through one Marshall cabinet and a borrowed amp.” From Easter Parade’s sepia-toned introspection, complete with tolling church bells buried in the mix as deep as a recovered childhood memory, to his joyous declarations of love during the album’s second single, Tinseltown In The Rain, against a surging string section and shuffling rhythm guitar, Buchanan imparts a sense of hope to many of the settings that evoke dislocation and distance, that sense of being alone in the crowded city. In November 2012, Virgin Records released two-CD "Collector's Edition" versions of the band's first two albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats. Each version had the original album remastered by engineer Calum Malcolm, along with a bonus disc of rare and previously unreleased material selected by Buchanan and Bell. A similar reissue of the third album, Peace at Last, was released on 3 March 2014. Two decades later he offered The Herald niceties more telling of the group’s character: “We didn’t say, ‘That’s fine, it’s good enough, let’s go out and get laid.’ We’d look at each other and say, ‘Is that right? No? Right, see you Monday.’ People talk about us as if it’s self-indulgent, but there were a lot of sacrifices. I was not in a jacuzzi. I was in a studio in East Lothian!” Read more: Making The Sundays’ Reading, Writing & Arithmetic

A Walk Across the Rooftops is the debut album by Scottish band The Blue Nile, released on 30 April 1984 on Linn Records in the UK and on A&M Records in the US. Although the album was released to little fanfare and was not a big hit on its initial release, it slowly accumulated fans and sales through word of mouth as the years passed, and by the time the follow-up Hats was released in 1989, A Walk Across the Rooftops had sold 80,000 copies. [4] It continued to gather praise when reissued in 2012. It’s like a miracle that we don’t really ever discuss. Why in the name of God can it reduce you to tears when one note goes ‘Ah’ and another note goes ‘Oh’ at the same time? Listening to melodies and going on these mini-journeys is so crucial, and it saddens me sometimes that music has just turned into a loss-leader in a supermarket. Roberts, Chris (21 November 2012). "The Blue Nile A Walk Across the Rooftops: Collector's Edition Review". BBC Music . Retrieved 7 March 2013.As a side note, to keep things in context for younger listeners or for those of us who have forgotten, it must be remembered that in 1983 samplers as we know them did not exist. All of the sounds on the recording had to be physically played and recorded on snippets of tape and then edited and cut and finally taped together to create the masters. This endeavor was pain staking and slow. The exacting standards and obsession over every detail by the band also added to the time it took to record the album, but that commitment is what made it so good. Recording Engineer Malcolm recalls of the period of recording, “ They were always particularly sensitive to not doing the wrong thing and making sure it had the absolutely right emotional impact.” Thankfully they had a record label that possessed the necessary patience to wait for the end result. The album would finally debut in May of 1984.