Hats

Product Information

While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including Vashti Bunyan, Phil Collins, and the 1975, to this day nothing sounds quite like Hats. The Blue Nile themselves never quite replicated it, opting for a loose, soulful atmosphere on 1996’s Peace At Last and a more sober approach for 2004’s High. Its closest companion is Paul Buchanan’s 2012 solo album Mid Air—a collection of near-demos on piano that further refined his sunken vignettes. “Tear stains on your pillow,” he sings in “Wedding Party,” “I was drunk when I danced with the bride.” The stories—as with most concerning the Blue Nile—are between the lines. I have the same Nimbus copy, bought in The Netherlands when I lived there. I just ripped it, and no problems. I'm listening on headphones as I type, no issues.

The members of the Blue Nile met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. After graduating and easing into an uninspiring teaching gig, Buchanan says he and his friends turned to music in search of a career that they “could be instinctive about.” With Buchanan on guitar and vocals, Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore on keyboards and synth, and Robert Bell on bass, they recruited a drum machine as their fourth member. a b Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7. Sodomsky, Sam (27 November 2018). "The 1975's Matty Healy Dissects Every Song on A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on 11 January 2021 . Retrieved 23 February 2021.

Tavakoli, Mina (20 November 2020). "Almost anarchy: The Style Council and the smooth sounds of sophisti-pop". The Washington Post . Retrieved 21 April 2021. Hats peaked at number 12 on the UK Albums Chart. [8] Three singles were released from the album: the first, " The Downtown Lights", was released in September 1989 and peaked at number 67 on the UK Singles Chart, followed by " Headlights on the Parade" in September 1990 which reached number 72, and " Saturday Night" in January 1991, which reached number 50. [8] Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.” Holden, Stephen (30 July 1990). "Review/Pop; The Blue Nile's Mystical, Majestic Ballads". The New York Times. New York . Retrieved 7 February 2023.

Blais-Billie, Braudie; Sodomsky, Sam (12 June 2018). "Pure Bathing Culture Cover the Blue Nile's Hats in Its Entirety". Pitchfork . Retrieved 13 November 2022. a b Edwards, D. M. (31 January 2013). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops / Hats". PopMatters . Retrieved 10 March 2013. Headlights on the Parade" (live in Tennessee with Larry Saltzman, Steve Gaboury and Nigel Thomas) – 6:20 Hats featured strongly on the end of year critics' lists, making number eight on Melody Maker 's albums of the year list, [21] and number 18 on NME 's list. [22] "The Downtown Lights" was also placed at number 15 on Melody Maker 's singles of the year list. [23] Still a landmark, still high, still somehow intangible: The Blue Nile didn’t sound or function like any normal band.

Their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, arrived in 1984 via the stereo equipment company Linn, who were looking to expand their reach by starting a label. (“Linn weren’t a record company and we weren’t a band,” Buchanan would later reflect in Elliot J. Huntley and Edith Hall’s biography From a Late Night Train.) Still, their unusual working relationship allowed the members of the Blue Nile to record in Linn’s studios and operate without a strict deadline. As so often happens with our first brushes of love, the band chased this experience the rest of their career. No pressure and no expectations—a creative process they could be instinctive about. Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis. The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone. Stay and Heatwave are heroically restrained; Easter Parade and Automobile Noise are elegies full of ghosts and blood. The previously unreleased St. Catherine’s Day is as sad and beautiful as can be. Both this and Hats still take the top of your head off, gently.

In some ways, you can almost hear Hats as taking place in one 24-hour period, a final struggle to salvage a depleted relationship under the beacons of skyscrapers giving way to a dark night of the soul. “Over The Hillside” is the approach, a prelude that strives to locate rejuvenation on the horizon, that old iconography of that something else at the other end of the journey. “The Downtown Lights” is the welcoming fanfare, the poppier single that makes you feel embraced by the city, full of anticipation as much as broken fragments. Hats (CD liner notes). The Blue Nile. Linn Records. 1989. LKHCD2. {{ cite AV media notes}}: CS1 maint: others in cite AV media (notes) ( link) Now remastered (for once, the sound being both brittle and big, that null word has value) and reissued with added rarities (as is its sublime 1989 successor, Hats), its hopeful melancholy transcends its era like an Edward Hopper painting. Synthesisers, the 80s’ new toy, abound, but are used with such naïve grace, over rhythms both simple and circuitous, that they refuse to date.Hats is the second studio album by Scottish band The Blue Nile, originally released on 16 October 1989 on Linn Records and A&M Records. To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights. By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks. Hats was voted number 345 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). [24] Q placed Hats at number 92 on its list of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever" in 2000 and at number 38 on its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s" in 2006. [25] [26] Legacy [ edit ]

In a 2012 interview with ClashMusic.com, Buchanan reflected on the time lost trying to make the album: For anyone looking to build their career and see the world moving forward at a frantic pace, they are instructed to live in the city, but few remember to tell of how mentally foreboding the prospect can be. Though the extreme condensity is thrilling from a newcomer’s perspective, everyone eventually feels that overwhelming entrapment, simultaneously compressed and left alone. Glaswegian band The Blue Nile, and particularly frontman and musical director Paul Buchanan, are deeply entrenched with this experience.

Notes

The Blue Nile’s career defies narrative. Like the music, the story itself is all ellipses. Yet as much as they favored gestures and leaving things not-totally-said, their albums remain complete ideas. These albums might not entirely reveal themselves, but they are there, waiting, for you to find your own meaning in them. With Hats in particular, the thing they left behind is pristine yet worn, a crystal covered in grime and tears but still shining through.