the blue nile: hats

btw this is impossible

fuck polling a hat

most inexplicable discovery from the 5 favorite albums thread, never heard of this, had no idea so many people held it so dear.

Going for a sleeper, "Let's Go Out Tonight". By the way, if you've never seen the hour long film made of their one(?) US tour, it's on You Tube, called "Flags and Fences", it's great

what i never heard of flags and fences!

I have been saving the book about them (Nileism) for the right moment.

i've listened to this about 6 times since discovering it a couple of days ago (from the 5 favorites thread) and i think i do have an early favorite but right now all i think i can say for sure is that it's not "seven am". and "seven am" is not bad by any means!

what i love about this album, and this band (i listened to AWATR once too) is how well it romanticizes the feeling of being in love in (and/or with?) a big city -- so many of their songs evoke walking deliriously down a city street late at night, taking in all the sights and sounds, heart swelled with love, or lust, or...something

there are a lot of classic ilx tim f posts about the particular romanticism of the blue nile that you also nail there k3vin

Isn't 'let's go out tonight' the most pop song in here?

this is like asking to pick your favorite child

most inexplicable discovery from the 5 favorite albums thread, never heard of this, had no idea so many people held it so dear.

― flappy bird, Monday, October 3, 2016 12:31 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It feels like a minor hit, maybe an ost appearance? There's a craig armstrong version which I knew before the blue nile one:

https://youtu.be/osP05cpJKNM

the last minute of "downtown lights" :O

nah, downtown lights is the obvious pop song here - been covered by rod stewart, annie lennox, even keane have done a version xp

We had it at record club a few years ago.

https://devonrecordclub.com/2013/02/04/the-blue-nile-hats-round-45-toms-selection/

Rob's reaction was interesting...he doesn't like late period Talk Talk either and, whilst they are not all that similar sonically, there's something about the purity of the sound that I guess is anathema to his ears.

I went for Saturday Night but could have picked any of the seven (seven track albums are always fantastic!).

Isn't 'let's go out tonight' the most pop song in here?

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Monday, October 3, 2016 12:48 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, maybe. I always thought Headlights on the Parade was the poppiest

what i never heard of flags and fences!

I have been saving the book about them (Nileism) for the right moment.

― I wish you could see my home. It's... it's so... exciting (Jon not Jon), Monday, October 3, 2016

It's OK, rather prosaic considering how much a good writer could rhapsodize about them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arOG2_QG4ls

found an OG pristine vinyl copy of this for $1 a few months ago, pretty ridic what slips through the cracks sometimes.

still find it cheap at carboot sales here too, rubbing shoulders with chris rea et al

yeah same here, have been jamming it for the past few days. whatever past discussion there's been of it on ILM has somehow slipped by me for the decade i've been here
― ciderpress, Monday, October 3

Me three.

xpost to scik mouthy

it's hard to make a nuts and bolts case for an affinity between late talk talk and blue nile but i will say that the paul buchanan solo album is the only record that reminds me of the mark hollis solo album at all.

^^ more than enough to get me interested. Only heard abt Blue Nile's album through ilx last week, and Hollis was on my mind frequently.

album is called Mid Air

Listened to the title track of that and it reminded me of Lewis - L'amour

"Seven A.M." because it goes down a storm with just about any combination of Sade's "Make Some Room," the dub mix of Mr. Fingers' "What About This Love," M.E./Virgo's "School Hall," and the Arthur Baker "Rapid Eye" remix of Will Downing's "In My Dreams."

saturday night/quarter to five/when the storefronts are closed in paradise/meet me outside the cherry light

I love the meticulous productions of Talk Talk and David Sylvian's solo work, but I've never got on with The Blue Nile. I can't deny that the production on this record is great, but whenever I've listened to it I've often found my attention wavering very quickly. 'Let's Go Out Tonight' is a great example of a song that I switch off from long before the end.

Listened to the title track of that and it reminded me of Lewis - L'amour

― Evan, Monday, October 3, 2016 7:52 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok wow...

George Costanza: "If this is a lie, if this is a joke, if this is your idea of some cute little game, we're finished ...

:(

At the office through laptop speakers so maybe that is a dumb comparison.

For example I thought those were synth pads behind his voice and piano. Realizing they're not.

Saturday night obv

yup

yeah "saturday night" is the one that i've been most obsessed with, when the strings come in a little over halfway through the song it's just game over, music doesn't get much better than that

"From A Late Night Train" is imo as sublime as it gets

reminds me of Aztec Camera!

not exactly my bag in general, but will say the singer reminds me a bit of Adrian Belew

Noooooooooo

I would have thought that Let's Go Out Tonight might be a front-runner, but from the comments, maybe not. Anyway, it gets my vote, but all are great.

A lot of people seem to prefer the Craig Armstrong cover (on which Buchanan sings), but I think Hats remains the definitive version. Second place goes to Isaac Hayes version…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vuy0QJ0BA

Evan, all I meant was I want you to be right. I want it to sound like Lewis. And it does. Nothing dumb about it.

Oh, totally misread you then! I'm often a little too worried about offending those who are closer to an artist than I am. New to the Blue Nile myself but liked that solo track much more.

dude holy shit that isaac hayes cover of "let's go out tonight" !!

Oh, totally misread you then! I'm often a little too worried about offending those who are closer to an artist than I am. New to the Blue Nile myself but liked that solo track much more.

― Evan, Monday, October 3, 2016 9:58 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't say I was too clear with Seinfeld reference tbh. Just really, really wished your Lewis reference was on point. And it was.

yeah "saturday night" is the one that i've been most obsessed with, when the strings come in a little over halfway through the song it's just game over, music doesn't get much better than that

― k3vin k., Monday, October 3, 2016 7:00 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I was coming here to say that "saturday night" has the slightest of edges because the string refrain from the 3 and half minute mark is like two lovers walking towards each other on a city bridge.

also it's my "song i would sing on Idol or equiv" song.

"saturday night" is my vote

http://www.primlifestyles.com/wp-content/plugins/RSSPoster_PRO/cache/c9820_Beyonce-Formation-4.gif

most inexplicable discovery from the 5 favorite albums thread, never heard of this, had no idea so many people held it so dear.
― flappy bird, Monday, October 3, 2016 12:31 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya me neither

shouts out to my favorite lyric ever though: "in love we're all the same / we're walking down an empty street"

god that isaac hayes cover

this has become one of those albums I don't actually have to listen to to get killed by it, I just have to think about it

otm

I tend to want more "From a Late Night Train" and "Family Life" from this band rather than the usual lite funk, though I guess one of the things that makes those tracks special is that they are uniquely spare.

may I direct you to his solo album

Caution: challops ahead.

"I Want to Know What Love Is" by Foreigner would make a pretty good Blue Nile song.

No.

even if you stripped it down enough i don't think it'd be restrained enough

I can hear it but lyrically no.

Do we have a thread for songs that could be off Hats?

'The Lady in Red' :0

i wish there was a 12 min long mix of “saturday night”

― J0rdan S., Sunday, January 1, 2023 4:03 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whenever I listen to Hats it's the album plus "Saturday Night" two more times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3vuy0QJ0BA

oh man

^^ had a surreal moment when that came on the radio in a cafe near Sagrada Familia while the sun was setting circa 1999.
looking at Gaudi's architecture bathed in a golden glow while this unfamiliar slooooow version of a familiar song played, it felt like my brain was melting.
(being slightly tipsy didn't help.)

Is that a marimba? For someone who nails the late night lethargy of the song, adding that is like throwing in slide whistle or a saw. It's a 10, but ...

an aside: atmospheric slide whistle new fav micro-genre

"it's the poor man's pedal steel"

sorry. as you were.

but yeah, didn't know about this cover. pretty reminiscent of his classic sidelong makeovers of burt bacharach.

ofc i had to look it up and it originates as a b side from a uk only single. nice.

2024 - could this be the year the long-rumored complete second Paul Buchanan album releases?

new song — Paul Buchanan - Mid Air (The Blue Nile)

i thought i'd burned this album out but i can't seem to stop playing it lately. apologies if someone else has mentioned this about this album but it's a great working class album isn't it? of course i was always in absolute devotion to buchanan's vocal performance but i'm finding new appreciation for it - every syllable he utters is just unreal, so pure.

otm

apologies if someone else has mentioned this about this album but it's a great working class album isn't it?

i've always pictured the narrator as walking down the street late at night alone, it's a specific kind of working class urbanity. "over the hillside" kinda sets the stage ("walk me into town, the ferry will be there")

the album is obsessed w/ nightlife and the romantic possibilities of going out at night, but it's also so inwardly drawn and focused on the emotional aspect of socializing that there is barely any actual socializing happening in the songs. pretty much the only parts of the outside world he describes are the lights... i'm not sure the narrator at any point in the album is actually even inside. he could be moving thru life w/o a penny to his name. if you think about the great music about nightlife, how much of it involves being at the party or in the club? even putting aside anything from after the millennium, on songs like "west end girls" or janet "go deep" the narrator is singing about specific things like knocking tables over or the quality of the DJ. the physical distance of the narrator is part of what makes 'hats' hit so hard on an emotional level -- it exists almost strictly in the zone of time after the parties are over and the bars are closed and you're left only w/ your internal monologue, but w/ that certain sorta post-night out magic dancing around in your head. and i think that distance from the goings on also helps it code in the way that you're saying, map. a song like "let's go out tonight" renders the bar or club almost in religious terms -- he sings about being drawn to the light in the way people think about heaven. the concept of commerce w/in these spaces is absent from these songs

it's also an even more specific kind of british working class urbanity. obv my experience is not in the late 80s but even now there is still such a stronger culture of walking around and utilizing public transportation after a night out in the UK than there is in america. the people i hang out w/ in london are of similar class and professional status (which is to say, largely writers and journalists) as the people i hang out w/ in new york, but i never hear anyone in london at the end of the night be like "hey i'm leaving, my uber is outside," which is a regular occurrence in new york. my perception as a visitor anyway is that even now among ppl w/ enough disposable income to pay £15 to take a cab home, you still just walk to the bus or the tube and kinda let yourself be awash in the afterglow of a night out, which to me is very much the perspective from where this album comes

Afterglow is not a word I would I associate with a late night bus from George Square in Glasgow tbh.

one thing i've always puzzled over is the emotion that seems to be attached to all of the images of city lights, empty streets and cars going by. they always seem to be references to some kind of anchor point or manifestation of love and beauty in the context of a relationship - all of "let's go out tonight" seems to be that way. so i think a crucial part of this album is the subject of a grand love, and maybe romance itself. it's a very romantic album at its core, i think. so the other day it struck me that the city landscape that it occupies, which you describe so beautifully and thoroughly jordan, that maybe all of those images are stand-ins for transcendental love. i think of the rush of words at the end of "the downtown lights," it almost sounds like he's being crucified on them. there's the lyric "in love we're all the same / we're walking down an empty street." also i think references to friday and saturday are symbolic of romance and love in a similar way (and also part of the working class thing - fridays and saturdays being these weekly moments of possibility for working people). but these images aren't what usually get brought out as symbols for love - they're all ghostly, unoccupied, and transitory. there's a contradiction and a melancholy there. the generalness of romance and love rising above and away from the particularities of a person. i do find a certain truth to that. and ultimately it just feels saturated with hope for love and for romance in spite of the transitory and ghostly aspects of it, it's an album-length prayer for it.

ultimately it just feels saturated with hope for love and for romance in spite of the transitory and ghostly aspects of it, it's an album-length prayer for it.

i also think it implies that there is some value in that transitory period, that there is something itself romantic about melancholic longing. as a gay person this perspective feels very natural and comfortable to me... one coping mechanism for being in the closet is finding something meaningful and even special in your relationship to love and romance in that transitory period. of being the ghost. the album never resolves, and instead chooses to luxuriate in that in between

I think if one steps back from this album specifically, it's easier to see how Buchanan was invested in telling the same type of story (both in content and in form) over and over again.

"A Walk Across The Rooftops" (the song, which is the opening song on their first album) opens with:

I walk across the rooftops
I follow a broken Thread
Of white rags falling slowly down
Flags caught on the fences
I am in love, I am in love with you
I am in love, I am in love with you

This is a lyrical set piece we see over and over again, this intensely visual first-person description of moving through empty urban spaces like an archeologist, taking in everything but judging nothing, every detail pregnant with possibility but detached from any fixed signification - and then the shift to the simplest, most direct statement of romantic attachment possible. And the narrator and the listener both realise that this is the point, the vantage from which the world around has become both enlivened and estranged, lit up in the most intoxicating manner possible.

And so Buchanan encapsulates a certain aspect of love, which is the way it colours and transforms everything around it like sunlight (or city lights); and as with the sun, the actual detail of love is something that Buchanan can only gaze at directly for a moment before looking away, describing the source of this feeling in only the simplest terms before once again returning his gaze to a study of its effects.

Then, "Tinseltown in the Rain":

Why did we ever come so far?
I knew I'd seen it all before
Tall buildings reach up in vain
Tinseltown is in the rain
I know now love was so exciting
Tinseltown in the rain
All men and women
Here we are
Caught up in this big rhythm
One day this love will all blow over
Time for leaving the parade
Is there a place in this city
A place to always feel this way?

Archeology: the singer observes the seeming permanence of the city, the "tall buildings (which) reach up in vain" for the heavens, knowing that even these monuments are themselves fleeting if one zooms out far enough, but in the moment their permanence feels assured. And he wonders if this big emotion that is bursting out of him can last - is there a place in this city to always feel this way? Hoping that it can, fearing that it can't.

Do I love you? Yes, I love you
Will we always be happy go lucky?
Do I love you? Yes, I love you
But it's easy come, and it's easy go
All this talking is only bravado, yeah

Is this feeling real, can it last? And if it doesn't, would that make the way I feel now any less real?

just wanna say this has been a very enjoyable revive so far, some really great posts here

Yeah. Feeling this revive pretty hard

yeah love this discussion

“saturday night” is going to to be the closing song at my wedding

Killer choice.

This was the perfect soundtrack for my walk around rainy Vienna this afternoon.

Pray for me, praying for the light
Baby, baby, let's go out tonight

The wishful thinking/hoping/praying/begging of this album transports me through all different periods of my adult life.

i was worried about listening to this again after i broke up with someone a month ago. i have a burned cd of it in my car and every time i flip past it i wince. i'm just sitting around alone with my cat this afternoon and decided to put it on and ... it's definitely not ruined lol. 'over the hillside' moved me to tears as it does, not for the loss of someone or some thing, but for the insane ecstatic existence of love itself. so i'm just sitting here listening to this thing filled with gratitude.

You need to listen to Bête Noire stat.

what

The Ferry album with the closest mood to Hats.

ah gotcha

i think now is the time for more ferry in my life.

i was worried about listening to this again after i broke up with someone a month ago. i have a burned cd of it in my car and every time i flip past it i wince. i'm just sitting around alone with my cat this afternoon and decided to put it on and ... it's definitely not ruined lol. 'over the hillside' moved me to tears as it does, not for the loss of someone or some thing, but for the insane ecstatic existence of love itself. so i'm just sitting here listening to this thing filled with gratitude.

― five six seven, eight nine ten, begin (map), Saturday, May 17, 2025 2:50 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hope you’re doing ok map. and I am biased, because it’s when I first discovered this album, but right after a breakup seems like the perfect time to listen to this record

hey thanks k3vin. i'm doing well :). that's cool to hear that you discovered this after a breakup.

Only love will survive.

(Straight line from Donne's The Relic to Larkin's An Arundel Tomb to Headlights on the Parade.)

thankfully i have a lot of love in my life.

xp oh that's cool! i've got to check those out.

<3 map

:)

it's only love that gets you through

map, just wanted to cosign and say hey. always enjoy your insightful postings.

hats was pleasant from a distance until the summer after i got divorced and was living alone for the first time ever. i checked out the band because of their glowing reputation among critics (mainly amg+trouser press), but all that praise finally started making more sense after that. haven't really looked back since, of course.

i can't see the future, but it seems unlikely that this album will ever sound anything except comforting to me.

I love this album but the debut is still my go-to Blue Nile as it hit me at just the right moment in high school and "Hats" came out right after I graduated college.

I want to thank ILX because I had never heard of the Blue Nile until this thread blew up with the vinyl reissues and I bought them all unheard. They’re a beautiful band and running into a Blue Nile fan in the wild feels extremely special.

I want to thank ILX because I had never heard of the Blue Nile until this thread blew up with the vinyl reissues and I bought them all unheard. They’re a beautiful band and running into a Blue Nile fan in the wild feels extremely special.

i love ‘hats’ deeply but find it difficult to listen to sometimes, just the emotional overwhelm of it all. it’s not really something i can just casually listen to or have on in the background.

bete noire is great - thanks alfred.