| Author |
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Gareth
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 03:41 pm: | |
Nothing to do with the go-betweens but some of you might be pleased to learn that The Blue Nile have finally gotten it together enough to release another album (only 8 years after the last one?). It's called 'High' and is released 30th August (this year!). 9 tracks so not far off a new song for each year spent making the thing.  |
Catherine
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 03:53 pm: | |
Yippeeeee.
As long as nobody decides to analyse the lyrics... |
Nicky
| | Posted on Friday, July 16, 2004 - 10:11 pm: | |
PMSL Catherine
Seriously, I'm looking forward to it
Nicky |
James
| | Posted on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 12:23 pm: | |
From the 'Daily Record'
BILLY SLOAN: BLUE NILE ON HIGH WITH NEW ALBUM Jul 4 2004
Billy Sloan: IT'S taken longer to complete than the new Scottish Parliament building and is the best-kept secret since Osama Bin Laden's address. I hope you're sitting down. You won't believe it. The Blue Nile have finished recording their new album. How can I be sure? I've heard it. I'm the only rock writer in Scotland who's been given a preview.
It's taken the band eight years to record the tracks longer than The Beatles were together. But it's been worth the wait. The album is called High and will be released on Sanctuary Records on August 30. It's their first album since Peace At Last in 1996 and only the fourth of their amazing 23-year career.
The trio singer Paul Buchanan, bassist Robert Bell and piano player Paul Moore recorded High at Castlesound Studios in Pentcaitland, near Edinburgh, with ace producer Callum Malcolm. I can't stop playing it.
One track, Days Of Our Lives, has Buchanan's soulful vocals over a metronome-style piano track. The haunting lyrics remind me of a modern-day Eleanor Rigby. Cracking lines include 'Living in every city/ In somebody else's clothes/ Christmas trees without angels/ Wiping my bloody nose'. Another stand-out track, Toledo, is one US legends Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits would be proud of. And the years have not diminished Buchanan's superb vocals. He's still one of the best Scots rock singers.
He said: 'I always try to make my vocals sound like a person rather than a terribly accomplished singer delivering a song. We like to let the vocals really go in tandem with the music.' It's hoped The Blue Nile will launch High with their first gigs on home soil in years. It boasts nine songs, a few dating back a decade. A Blue Nile insider told me: 'The album is difficult to categorise. Some tracks are very upbeat while on others they've gone back to a much simpler sound.' |
Catherine
| | Posted on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 02:46 pm: | |
Nicky,
I am genuinely looking forward to the new album. Just being a bit snippy bout re: other discussions. Sorry bout the italics. Hope I’ve not been infected by a virus I picked up somewhere. I was also in a hurry to get home from work…
By the way novice poster type question: what does PMSL stand for? Hope it's not Premenstrual silly lady??? |
Catherine
| | Posted on Monday, July 19, 2004 - 02:47 pm: | |
Italics didn't work.... Whole message ruined... Think I'll go now... |
Jeff Whiteaker
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 08:32 pm: | |
Exciting news indeed! But then, I wasn't too thrilled about Peace At Last, so I'm a bit skeptical. |
Cassiel
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 08:34 pm: | |
The Observer Music Monthly -- a horrible, shitty little magazine compiled by morons and men called Casper -- gave the album four stars, although the reviewer, Barney 'Don't ever forget that's short for Barnaby' Hoskyns was rather scathing about the album. Banged on about one track being wallpaper 40 something music, and another being 'interminable.' It was awfully written. Mentioned 'The Gospel according to St Paul' or some such, without mentioning that the lead singer is called Paul Buchanan, so the unitiated will have no idea what Barnaby was droning on about.
As ever, I think I'll be making my own mind up (I'm still reeeling from the discovery that Phil Collins is a big Blue Nile fan. As is Sting apparently. Wonder if Chris De Burgh has heard their stuff?) |
Gareth
| | Posted on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 09:31 pm: | |
I can't wait to hear it but, like Jeff, i wasn't too blown away by 'Peace at Last'. Some wonderful tracks on there but a couple of duffers too (which they'd never really had before on an album but given there were only 7 songs on each of the 2 previous albums you'd expect the quality to be high). The cover to 'High' is awful too so no change there. They obviously didn't spend the 8 or so years on a graphics design course. Easily a contender for 'Band with worst album covers'. |
Jeff Whiteaker
| | Posted on Wednesday, July 21, 2004 - 12:47 am: | |
Tell me about it! Hats has to have the grossest cover of all of 'em. I mean, it looks like the cover for some cheezy 80s dance hits compilation. |
michael
| | Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2004 - 11:34 am: | |
I had a listen to a couple of their songs - Stay and The Wires are Dowm. Quite good, moody, gentle, thanks for the tip. 80s |
Peter
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2004 - 03:37 pm: | |
There's a feature on the Blue Nile in todays Irish Times (26 August) |
Cichli Suite
Member
Username: Cichli_suite
Post Number: 1
Registered: 08-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2004 - 03:50 pm: | |
Thanks Peter. Since The Irish Times requires you to pay for its online content, I've laboriously typed  the feature for you all to read:
And quiet flows the Nile
The Blue Nile have binned more songs than they have released, with just four albums in two decades. It makes it hard for them to fit into the pop world, writes Jim Carroll.
You cannot mistake this voice. Hearing it on brand-new songs is a sign that another Blue Nile album is finally coming down the tracks. For those who treasure Paul Buchanan singing weather-beaten pop about weather-beaten lives, a lengthy wait is almost over. That this audience has waited eight years to hear High shows that patience is more than a virtue when you're dealing with a band who have released just four albums in 21 years.
If pop's high street is increasingly cluttered with low-rent operations fronted by brash barkers hawking shoddy goods of every description, The Blue Nile operate in that little artisan store hidden down a side lane. For those who make the effort to seek them out, The Blue Nile offer music untainted by commerce or fashions. The reasons why 1983's A Walk Across The Rooftops and 1989's Hats still sell are because few artists deal with such matters in this way. Rich, soulful and exquisitely crafted, it's extraordinary music about the most ordinary of circumstances.
Yet Buchanan knows that The Blue Nile's reluctance to release what they view as substandard work has meant that many people just do not know who they are. With only one album released in the 1990s (and the patchy Peace At Last at that), a generation has grown up without hearing the band.
"We sometimes give scientific reasons for the gaps between records, but we just lost our way a couple of times; it's no more complicated than that," says Buchanan ruefully. "We would record a lot of songs and then realise that they were not right, that they were too uptight or too formularised or too thought out."
Constant writing and recording have yielded hundreds of tracks (the nine songs on High were written and recorded over a decade), yet only about 30 have ever been released. "For all I know we could have scrapped our best tracks during that process," he shrugs, "but it doesn't seem that way to me. You always set out to do the best you can, but sometimes songs can be informed by anxiety or some other digression. Our criterion is fairly simple: if it moves you it's on, and if it doesn't move you it's off."
Since they released Peace At Last, in 1996, Buchanan, P. J. Moore and Robert Bell have been writing and recording as they've always done. Live shows have been largely non-existent: their last was at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin in 2001, at a tribute concert for Uaneen Fitzsimons, the music broadcaster who was killed in a car accident.
"There have been days, and indeed weeks or months, when we haven't done anything because one of us just isn't in sync with the others," says Buchanan of life during the eight-year gap. "That becomes more of an element as you get older and other things come into your life and you lose that certainty of youth. It's important to keep the unit together to ensure the same chemistry, because we're found that three heads are better than one. At the same time, all three heads have to be operating at the same time."
Such lack of productivity means a somewhat limited income, and Buchanan mentions a frugal lifestyle. The old records still sell, and the band received a tidy pay-off from Warner Bros, their previous label, but even such revenue streams aren't enough to prevent what Buchanan terms "those Mr Micawber moments where you're down to your last fiver".
The singer believes they have ended up here because they followed their nature. "This is not the life that I wished for: I would have taken a more superficial result if it had been on offer," he says. "You don't set out thinking and hoping you'll grow old doing this. The bottom line is this is just what happened. Our merit, if it is a merit, is that we stuck with it.
"We may have alienated people or missed out on people or lost momentum or wasted effort, but we have at least maintained our credibility - and that's important in the long run. You have to stick to your goals, and we're lucky, because we're still going. I would like to be able to look back and know we have always done the best we could."
But there must be a part of Buchanan that looks at the success of other groups and thinks of what might or should have been. When he talks about "putting in all this agonising and effort, and then other groups come along and effortlessly sell loads of records", his frustration is obvious. After all, Coldplay and Keane are all the rage these days, and they do what some people might call emotional, intelligent pop not a million miles removed.
Buchanan uses an interesting analogy to explain this. "I went to see Analyze This in the cinema and it was good, it was funny. But I didn't think it was as good as The Sopranos. The Sopranos is on at 10.30 or 11 p.m. on Channel 4, and it doesn't get a huge mainstream audience, but if you love it you wouldn't change it for anything.
"You could look at someone like Coldplay and how effortless it has been for them. The lead singer [Chris Martin\] even appears to have a healthy emotional life, while I'm wandering around like a cross between Woody Allen and Dylan Thomas and not getting anywhere. But I would be lying if I said they're doing what we do.
"I don't think our music is soft music, but I think it's compassionate in the real sense of the word. I like what they do, and there's an emotional resonance in it, but I don't see the whole movie. It's two different things, it's like Ulysses and Tess Of The D'Urbervilles. They're both good books, and both have words on the page, but one is dealing with a different reality."
Buchanan is acutely aware that his views on music are hugely at odds with popular opinion. "The way music is branded these days seems to sell it short," he says. "It's not really about commerce or ring tones. Music is a language, and I think it has been hijacked and turned into a commodity and a lifestyle. You get acts pushed towards you who are just collections of people who met on TV shows. It's a fact of life now, and it's the way things have advanced. You don't want to have sour grapes about it, but you can't help wondering where it is going."
For him and The Blue Nile, their striving for perfection is about maintaining a relationship. "The way we're trying to address the listener is a private experience, it's not about a sound bite. I wouldn't like to disappoint people. You can't have a relationship where you want the work to have a value and only do that some of the time: you have to do that all of the time."
Buchanan admits he is something of an "apologist", but his dedication to the cause is obvious. It's this compulsion that has meant both that The Blue Nile have scrapped more songs than they have released and that they have not reached the same heights as many lesser talents.
He knows too that he is the most unlikely of pop stars when he says that self-importance is the enemy. "The three of us are trying to hack away at that. We feel we're observers rather than pop musicians or artists: we're not one of them. The way pop musicians have been rewarded and treated over the years actually removes you from the very thing that you're doing. You can't just go to a restaurant: any room there has to be a VIP room or table.
"I've experienced a tiny amount of it, and I can tell you there is no magic realm, you don't get into a room where everything is better just because you get to hang out with Jennifer Lopez every day." He smiles broadly. "That just doesn't happen to us." Lopez doesn't know what she is missing.
High is on Sanctuary Records |
Babs Keating's neighbour
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, September 10, 2004 - 04:41 pm: | |
To be honest, I've been rather disappointed with 'High'. By comparison to the previous three albums it strikes me as a decidedly soulless offering. At times it feels like a methodical run-through; a 'History of the Blue Nile Sound' almost.
Perhaps I will grow to love it. I am, after all, comparing it to the incomparable... |
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