The Blue Nile

The Blue Nile, High (Sanctuary)

Richard Williams. The Guardian

In his original sleeve note to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, the pianist Bill Evans compared the method by which that album was made to the procedure followed by a certain kind of Japanese calligraphic artist: an inordinate amount of care over the selection and preparation of materials followed by a fleeting moment of creation in which nothing can be repeated and nothing erased. Sometimes simplicity is the hardest thing of all to bring off.

The songs on High, the fourth album from the Blue Nile, give no clue that they took eight years to create. So exquisite as to be almost transparent, they sound like the result of a few quick brush-strokes. Eight years, however, is the gap between the new recording and its predecessor, Peace At Last. In turn, Peace At Last came seven years after Hats. And Hats followed A Walk Across the Rooftops, their debut, by six years.

This time, at least, there is a practical reason for the lengthy period of gestation: an ME-type illness kept Paul Buchanan, their singer and guitarist, out of action for a couple of years. Nevertheless, there is something magnificent about the sheer doggedness of the Blue Nile's adherence to the unorthodox trajectory of their singular career. The group's three members - Buchanan, Robert Bell and PJ Moore - have produced for public consumption a mere 33 songs in just over 20 years. But their impact has far exceeded that of many more productive outfits, and by distilling such limited quantities of a particular emotional essence, they have encouraged a loyal following.

Existential melancholy is the mode they explored in A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats. In songs such as Tinseltown in the Rain and The Downtown Lights, Buchanan evoked urban solitude with greater precision than any singer since the mid-1950s Sinatra. The Blue Nile made torch songs for the Thatcher years, and they turned the lean, floppy-haired Buchanan into an enigmatic archetype.

Such an image tends to persist, particularly when time passes and the subject remains lean and floppy-haired. "It probably comes across like I'm the man in the car advert," Buchanan admits in an interview in the current issue of Uncut magazine, "with the big raincoat, walking in the rain, and all of that." But there is more to him, and to the Blue Nile, than a particular strain of stylish gloom, and those prepared to hang around after the popular success of Hats discovered that its successor marked a considerable change of tone. While making Peace At Last, they downplayed the neon-lit synth washes and the robotic drum machines with which they had evoked the alienation and the relentless beat of modern city life. More open and organic sounds, including finger-picked acoustic guitar and a choir, were matched to a set of unashamedly optimistic lyrics celebrating family, community, peace, faith and love.

What made the new combination work, even for those besotted by the earlier headlights-in-the-rain ballads, was that while he celebrated the consolations of life, Buchanan still sounded like a man on the edge of an emotional precipice. The sound of his voice - mostly a murmur in the listener's ear, occasionally vaulting up to a heart-aching upper register - told his listeners that this was the same guy who had gazed through the window of the late-night train and seen only the emptiness of his own existence. "Now that I've found peace at last," he sang, "tell me, Jesus, will it last?" He was waiting for an answer, knowing that a false step might mean a plunge into the abyss.

Although High marks another shift of mood, its ingredients are familiar enough. Now, however, the emotional commitment of Peace At Last is combined with the observational detachment of the earlier work. So while Buchanan is still watching the world through a window - in the opening song, The Days of Our Lives, the window belongs to someone else - his eye has grown more compassionate.

Almost all of these nine songs are so well turned as to validate his claim that the group discarded "hundreds" more while preparing the material for High. The exception is Everybody Else, a curious, uneventful trifle. Otherwise the Blue Nile's gift for an impassioned chord change is frequently in evidence, along with the instrumental economy that was such a telling feature of the previous album.

With three songs in particular they touch their peak. The glorious descending melody of Because of Toledo carries a western narrative full of fractured, inconclusive images: "Girl leans on a jukebox/ In a pair of old blue jeans/ Says, 'I don't live here/ But I don't really live anywhere'..." The urgent She Saw the World is propelled by the kind of mid-tempo 4/4 that pushes ahead of the beat (think of the Beatles' Things We Said Today or the Stones' Honky Tonk Woman) under pensive, hovering strings - a magical contrast. The closing track, Stay Close, emerges from a shimmer of what sound like Mellotron strings and woodwind (but are probably something far more expensive), turning a momentary thought and a snatch of melody into a quiet hymn that concludes with a stately diminuendo.

In pop, most people do their best work within five or six years. How extraordinary, then, that after more than two decades of activity, the Blue Nile remain on course, their range expanded, their focus more refined, unshaken in their determination to proceed at their own measured pace.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Album: The Blue Nile. High, EPSTEIN/SANCTUARY

By Andy Gill

27 August 2004

Like the overrated Prefab Sprout, The Blue Nile are one of the sacred cows of AOR, their albums fawned over in a way that has non-believers like myself scratching our heads in bafflement. The long gaps between Blue Nile albums - this is only their fourth in 21 years - tends, I think, to blind fans to their limitations, which are partly to do with Paul Buchanan's rusty warbling, partly to do with his melancholy world view, and partly to do with the band's musical method. The opener, "Days of Our Lives", relies on a single, repeated piano chord to evoke the desired mood of grey-tinged stasis. It's so defining an element that the question "Are these the days of our lives?" hardly needs answering. The conclusion, "An ordinary miracle is all we really need", speaks volumes about the band's attitude. A similar combination of monochord piano and swelling strings provides the glum portent behind the lives of quiet desperation inhabiting the title track. The formula is perhaps best employed on "Broken Loves", where the piano motif sustains the tension throughout a song about how children reward parental love with ignorance and then, inevitably, desertion. Family, love, security and rootlessness are the themes of High, best covered in "I Would Never", which sounds like a weaker cousin of U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name".

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd