Scots missed: The Blue Nile's High

These are sulphurous times. You don’t need me to tell you that, of course. Just turn on the news and see Neanderthals making up for the lack of a summer football tournament abroad to bring their particular brand of knuckle-dragging nationalist mayhem to Westminster. Then there is the relentless death march of the 'other' virus, plus rancour over gender politics and myriad other social disagreements chewing up life still (mostly) in lockdown. Never has there been a greater need of a soothing balm like The Blue Nile.

“The Blue who?”, you ask. Tinseltown In The Rain or The Downtown Lights? No? A shame, then. OK, the Scottish trio’s reputation was hardly strengthened by a somewhat indolent output of just four albums in 21 years. But in that quartet there was more than enough to justify the critical acclaim from, admittedly, a cognoscenti that included music luminaries and musos alike who fell in love with their somnolent mood music. 

In each of those albums - A Walk Across The Rooftops, Hats, Peace At Last and 2004’s High - The Blue Nile set a benchmark for an unashamed romanticism, channeled through ruminatory songs laid over beds of synths blended with singer Paul Buchanan’s sonorous voice (invariably described as “haunting”). Theirs was vibe music that went boldly against the brashness of rock and pop throughout the course of the decades their output spanned. Despite an apparently fractious denouement, the band have been progressively re-releasing their catalogue with audiophile remasters befitting a band whose first album was issued on a label owned by Linn, the high-end hi-fi people. That brought The Blue Nile to the attention of Peter Gabriel, himself no sonic slouch and one of many big names to champion their cause (Gabriel would go on to involve Buchanan in his OVO album and show for the Millennium Dome's opening in 2000). High is therefore the last of the reissues, available both as a double-CD package containing four new songs (Wasted, I, Big Town and Here Come The Bluebirds) plus extended remixes of The Days Of Our Lives and She Saw The World (two of the album's standouts), and for the first time on vinyl (and in the super-duper 180g format, too). 

Although I've always hated the American term "adult oriented rock", High's adult orientation veers more towards the wistfulness of reaching a certain age. I suppose another way of saying this, is that - from my perspective as a 52-year-old man - much of the imagery is reflective of the things someone of my age pays attention to: weather and the state of things, for example. Like it's predecessors, High carries a gentle melancholy. For some reason, I've often associated this with The Blue Nile's inherent Scottishness. I know it's not wet and grey the whole time in Scotland, but the sparsity of the band's music invokes a palette of cool sonics. Some might find this dull. I, personally, have always found it refreshing. Coming eight years after its predecessor, High hardly moved the band's oeuvre onwards, but then that was never going to be an issue, such was the standard that they'd set on their previous outings. The music remained luscious, Buchanan's voice remained...er...haunting, but there was a subtle change in lyrical tone as songs tackled the world-weary topics such as the passing of time and the passage of relationships. 

This reflection might be borne from the fact that Buchanan was laid low by an ME-like illness for a couple of years between High and Peace At Last, but may even be the result of tensions between him and bandmates Robert Bell and P.J. Moore which made the album's gestation somewhat fractious. That turbulence could have manifested itself in the shear size of the task Buchanan, Bell and Moore had in whittling down "hundreds" of songs, according to the singer, that were candidates for High before settling on the nine committed to record. Nothing - or at least, very little - is left to waste. All nine tracks land and land well.

The fractiousness that coloured the recording of High can be seen as the part of the fuel that made it. Clearly, from a musical and lyrical point of view, there was much pondering going on. Buchanan himself has admitted as much, describing High as "stoic" and "to some extent a record about ourselves", implying that the band had reached their limit. "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," he told The Quietus in 2013. The subsequent album tour was made in the late spring of 2006 without Moore, even reducing The Blue Nile billing to "Paul Buchanan sings the songs of The Blue Nile", albeit with Bell on board (who remains to this day featured on The Blue Nile's reissues website, along with Buchanan). 

To this day there has been no definitive word on whether the group exists or not, though the renewed commercial activity with the reissues has lit a faint fire of hope about new material. Perhaps, though, we must be resigned the fact that sometimes a candle simply blows out in its own time. We can bemoan The Beatles' mere decade as a functioning pop group, or the seven years between Jimi Hendrix's US Army discharge and his death, but those brief windows gave us so much. The Blue Nile, in a way, can be viewed similarly: four albums, four gems. That'll do.