Los Angeles, London and New York pound round-the-clock with the beat of conspicuous consumption. If you hear a hit record on the radio or buy one in a record store, chances are it was made there.
In and around Glasgow, Scotland, however, there aren`t a whole lot of distractions, or high-tech recording studios, or places to stage a concert. There is only a remote, gray beauty.
Perhaps that explains why ”Hats” (A&M), a new album by a Glasgow-based band called the Blue Nile, sounds like no other record release in recent memory.
It floats rather than throbs, shimmers instead of slams. Over the course of seven songs, six of which are at least five minutes long, the music unfolds like a flower, almost imperceptibly enveloping the listener in its beauty and sadness. Unlike most pop music, where a grabby melodic ”hook” or richocheting snare beat provide instant gratification, Blue Nile`s songs sneak up on even the most attentive listener.
Like Marvin Gaye`s soul classic ”What`s Goin` On” or Bill Evans` jazz masterwork ”Spring Leaves,” ”Hats” gently demands to be listened to over and over again, so that every one of its tiny aural surprises, every subtle shift in its mood and rhythm, can be appreciated.
The album arrives in America at a time when the tastes of industry executives in a handful of cities are increasingly dictating what kind of music we listen to and buy. ”Hats,” however, sounds as if its creators haven`t listened to a pop or rock radio station in 15 years.
For that matter, the members of Blue Nile-Paul Buchanan, Robert Bell and Paul Moore-look like they haven`t seen the sun in 15 years. With their furrowed brows and shy demeanors, this trio of mid-30ish, college-educated family men look like they`d be more at home in the cast of ”Dead Poets Society” than in some MTV rock video.
They have yet to perform in concert, even though they began recording nearly a decade ago, and they`ve traveled little outside Scotland simply because they couldn`t afford to. Their private, isolated world has been defined by an old Victorian schoolhouse that they use as their recording studio and their modest homes in Glasgow.
No wonder their two records sound so strange and lonesome.
”It may seem like some weird Scottish master plan,” says Moore with a chuckle. ”But that`s just the way we are.”
”We never refer to other bands in our work,” Buchanan says. ”If a song sounds vaguely like another band, that`s against it. If the listener hears a certain kind of guitar sound or snare sound that he`s already familiar with, it`ll provoke a familiar response. We try to open spaces for the senses.”
Blue Nile`s first album, ”A Walk Across the Rooftops” (A&M/1984), won critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Without a tour or much airplay, the group acquired an almost mystical reputation among music aficionados.
”We made the first record, then we listened to it and thought, `Oh, my God, does this music make any sense?,”` Buchanan says. ”We kept talking about fire escapes and rain and feelings and avenues in cities we`d never seen before and when we finished we thought, `No one is ever gonna hear this!`
”But the fact that we didn`t do TV or posters or tours sort of demonstrated that the music wasn`t about the normal things. Due to good faith and similar feelings of other people they sort of scooped us up and kept us going.”
Faith and friends were needed in the intervening five years, when Blue Nile ran into the red. ”We were completely broke-we even got locked out of our studio for a year because another band was working there,” Buchanan said. Because the group was self-managed, the phone kept ringing constantly with inquiries from fans and record executives about the band`s progress on the next album. External pressures soon became self-imposed, and the band`s music suffered.
It took a few years and a few reels of junked master tapes for them to realize that they were going about it all wrong.
”I think the thing that best equips us is that we`re so ill-equipped,”
Buchanan says. ”We don`t practice, we don`t know much about technology and we don`t use expensive equipment.”
Individually, the Blue Nile, with Moore on keyboards, Bell on bass and Buchanan singing and playing guitar, is a creditable garage band and little more. But add their collective imaginations to the mix and you have a band that transcends its limitations.
”We`ll listen to the music we make and say, `It`s like Chicago,` which is odd, because none of us had ever seen Chicago until today,” Moore says.
”People say our music evokes a sense of the past, a timelessness,” Bell adds. ”But it`s about a past that didn`t actually happen more than a remembered past.”
Perhaps that is why ”Hats” is suffused with melancholy, with a sense of striving and incompleteness. Hovering above a dense blend of rippling keyboard and R & B-style rhythm guitar, Buchanan`s voice is full of bittersweet yearning.
”I was finishing a degree in literature (at Glasgow University) when I heard two records, Mahler`s Fifth Symphony and Marvin Gaye`s `What`s Goin`
On,”` Buchanan says. ”I was attracted to the ambivalence of the music, that it could be ecstatically happy and ecstatically sad simultaneously. It gave me a feeling that I`ve longed for and longed to re-create.”
Buchanan does so by singing about fundamental obsessions and desires. In
”Let`s Go Out Tonight,” love isn`t equated with sex but with a sacrament. In ”The Downtown Lights,” a walk down an empty street inspires a torrent of words, images and impressions, each line more intensely delivered than the last:
The neons and the cigarettes
The rented rooms, the rented cars
Crowded streets, the empty bars
Chimney tops and trumpets . . .
The colored shoes, the empty train
I`m tired of crying on the stairs!
That isn`t your typical rock-song verse; it`s more akin to a soul-searching jazz solo, a beacon in the gloom. On the album`s last song,
”Saturday Night,” the ”ordinary” singer finds salvation in the arms of an ”ordinary girl.”
As the band members skipped around America for the first time, they ran into people who found some piece of their music to call their own. Frankly exhausted once their five-year struggle to create ”Hats” had ended, the band members were re-energized when they found that their endeavor had touched lives so far from home.
”We`d write about a building or lake that we imagined, and then we`d meet people who actually saw that building or lake near their home,” Buchanan marvels.
”It goes back to why we do this: We don`t want people to think about us when they listen to our music but about themselves. When they see their home, their life through our music, that makes me believe again in the idea that we can communicate.”
