Good Scottish Pop - The Blue Nile

They have released three albums and rumours are rife that a new album is due in 2004. So, that's three albums released in twenty three years, a workrate that makes the Scottish Parliament look prolific.

But, maybe it takes seven or eight years to produce each mini-masterpeice and if it does, then this writer doesn't mind waiting.

The Blue Nile are something of an enigma. Their brand of music occupies a space somewhere between subdued soul and melancholy pop jazz, underscored by the sublime voice of Paul Buchanan. They have been accused of being lightweight, VH1 fodder, but there is too much depth to their music to dismiss them so easily.

The band began recording in Edinburgh in 1981. The sound engineer at Castle Sound Studios was so impressed by what he heard that he sent a copy of a demo recording to a friend at RSO Records. The RSO roster included The Bee Gees and Sweet Inspiration so the attraction to either side is not immediately obvious. However, RSO signed the band and released their first single "I Love This Life". That's the good news. The bad news is that RSO went out of business two weeks after the release of the single which promptly sank without trace.

Paul Buchanan - singer extrodinaire

The band returned to the studio to record more material and as occasionally happens, when one door shuts another one opens.

Linn Products were a Scottish manufacturer of upmarket turntables and were trying to develop splicing machines for recording studios. They were sent sample tapes with which to practise cutting techniques, one of which contained the Blue Nile recordings. They promptly signed the group. Paul Buchanan later observed, 'Linn weren't a record company and we weren't a band.'

The first album release on Linn Records was distributed by Virgin. "A Walk Across the Rooftops" was critically accliamed and sold well for a first release on a small label, chalking up 100,000 sales. And it's a wee belter. "Tinseltown in the Rain" is a sparkling track and still sounds great twenty plus years later.

Fans would have to wait six years for the next release. Once again on Linn Records, "Hats" is starkness and emotion fused. Imagine standard pop songs stripped down to their elementary bones and you get close to the Blue Nile sound. Just as an artist can use a few brush strokes to create a vivid visual emotion, so Blue Nile create songs that live with you for a long time and use the minimal musical resource to do so.

Blue Nile - with Rickie Lee Jones

The band toured America to promote the album and worked with luninaries like Robbie Robertson (of The Band) and Rickie Lee Jones who still has photos of the band on her official Website. But the band were never into the record and promote cycle demanded by big labels and so although the album did well, making the UK top 20, it didn't really register where the labels always want to ... in the USA.

By now signed to mega label Warners, Blue Nile would make fans wait another seven years for the release of their third and so far final release, "Peace at Last". But by now the pop music world, or at least some of it, had caught up with Blue Nile. The group's brand of atmospheric, moody music no longer sounded distinctive, drawing comparisons to artists ranging from Suzanne Vega to Tears for Fears to the ambient dance scene. It is the least distinctive of their three releases. That's not to say it's a bad album. It's a long way from that.

As we write the band is no longer on Warner Brothers. Part of the pruning by major labels to divest themselves of anything interesting and concentrate on lowest common denominator global pap music. But keep your eyes and ears open for the new release. Everything suggests that this band are incapable of doing anything less than wonderful.