The Blue Nile

Glasgow

Paul Buchanan, Robert Bell and PJ Moore met at the University of Glasgow in the late 1970s. Buchanan, born in Edinburgh in 1956, studied literature and medieval history there, Bell, his childhood friend, took a mathematics degree, and Moore studied electronics. They played a handful of times as McIntyre and then as Night by Night before settling on the title of Alan Moorehead's 1962 book The Blue Nile. Around 1979 they began working with the engineer Calum Malcolm, who with the drummer Nigel Thomas became almost a fourth member. In the early days a drum machine filled that role.

Their first single, I Love This Life, came out in 1981 on their own Peppermint label, licensed to RSO. The label folded soon after and the record disappeared.

Rooftops

In 1983 they were recording at Malcolm's Castlesound studio in Pencaitland when the hi-fi maker Linn, which was testing speakers there, heard a demo of Tinseltown in the Rain and offered to start a label for them. The band took nine months to agree. Linn paid for the record and left the music alone, and the band reject the story that it was commissioned to show off hi-fi. Songs written on guitar or piano were rebuilt in the studio, every odd sound played by hand and edited on tape.

A Walk Across the Rooftops appeared on 30 April 1984. Melody Maker called it a stunning debut and Bono named it his album of the year, though it reached only 80 in the UK and had sold about 80,000 copies by 1989.

Every record should be compared to silence.

Paul Buchanan, 1984

Hats

The follow-up took five years. Linn installed them in a house in Gullane near the studio, the sessions stalled, Virgin, which had licensed their records, sued Linn, and a whole album's worth of songs was thrown away. Moved out of Castlesound to make room for another band, they regrouped in Glasgow, where Buchanan fought writer's block while Bell and Moore worked on a portastudio. The Downtown Lights broke the dam, and in 1988 much of the record came quickly. Hats was released in October 1989, reached 12 in the UK and drew raves from Q, NME and Melody Maker.

Only in 1990 did they tour, opening for Rickie Lee Jones in America, a trip BBC Scotland filmed as Flags and Fences, and playing a homecoming at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, the first non-classical band to do so.

Silences

In Los Angeles they worked on records by Julian Lennon, Robbie Robertson and Michael McDonald, and Buchanan co-wrote The Gift on Annie Lennox's Diva. In 1992 Buchanan signed the band to Warner Bros. without asking the others. Peace at Last, made in Paris, Dublin and Los Angeles and built around acoustic guitar, came out in June 1996 and reached 13. The manager Ed Bicknell freed them from Warner in 1997, they played Glastonbury, and then vanished for about seven years.

High arrived on Sanctuary in August 2004, made while Buchanan had chronic fatigue syndrome, and reached 10. Before its tour in February 2005, Buchanan and Bell realised Moore had stopped contacting them, which is usually taken as the end. The two toured as Paul Buchanan sings the songs of the Blue Nile until 2008, and Buchanan's solo Mid Air reached 14 in 2012. Moore, who later formed PJ Moore & Co., has said a reunion will not happen.

Legacy

Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Tears for Fears and Robbie Robertson admired them, Matty Healy calls them his favourite band, and Pitchfork hears them in Destroyer and the xx. Rod Stewart, Annie Lennox, Isaac Hayes and Tom Jones have covered their songs. In April 2024 Taylor Swift named the band and The Downtown Lights in Guilty as Sin?, and streams of the song rose by 1,400 percent in four days. Allan Brown's biography Nileism (2010) was written without the cooperation of Bell and Moore.