The Blue Nile

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the other thing about rain is rain in unlikely places 'cause there's a Blue Nile song called Tins- Tinsel Town in the Rain, isn't there, you know? And, like, the, the kind of emotional, the emotional weather forecast of, of Bl- the Blue Nile is it's always raining, isn't it really?

Yes.

You know, 'cause they're associated with- Scottish, you know.

[laughs] Rain was their natural state, you know what I mean?

It is.

And I always feel that Blue Nile carry that around with them.

Do you know that Loudon Wainwright wonderful song called When It's Gray in LA, It's Better That Way?

95% of the people in Egypt live close to the Nile River, and that's where they get about 95% of their drinking water.

And the Nile that we know that goes through Egypt by the pyramids and all that, that is actually mostly coming from two rivers called the White Nile and the Blue Nile.

And so the Blue Nile is where about roughly 85% of the water comes from, more or less.

I mean, seasonal and that sort of thing.

But the Blue Nile and the White Nile come together, and they come together at Khartoum, actually, in Sudan, right? But the Blue Nile goes up into the highlands in Ethiopia.

The Zionists, I think.

There was a huge information program about this dam that was being built in Ethiopia called the Gerd Dam.

They just came up with a name and then put some words around it.

... to sing those songs or to like try to write in that voice? Um, and you know, it makes sense you do that when you're young 'cause you don't necessarily have like the faculties or the references to like contextualize it, um, which is where like reading about music comes in.

Um, and nowadays, like I think like for me in the last like 10 years, maybe the Blue Nile is a good example where that album hit me so hard when I first listened to it.

Um, and-

Which, Hats or-

He just sing, he sings, "It ain't why, why, why, it just is." And there's a, to me, I always f- come back to that one because, I mean, Van is, Van's one of my favorites, for sure.

And, uh, and there were so...

You know, I'm glad you brought up the, the Blue Nile.

Um, I love the piece that you wrote and, and, uh, trying to find music that sounds like that, I don't know if this is the case for you.

I remember when I was five.

Well, my number three, so the Scottish band the Blue Nile's 1989 masterpiece Hats is a master class in self-production.

Like its predecessor, A Walk Across the Rooftops, the album was produced by the band, which namely singer-songwriter Paul Buchanan and bassist-keyboardist Robert Bell.

It was recorded for Linn Records, which is the audiophile record label arm of the audiophile equipment manufacturer-

So you already know it's going to sound amazing, and it absolutely does.

Whether you buy the CD or LP, whether you have a $10,000 system or a $500 system, it's a demo-worthy album.

We talk about world-building, and this album does a really pristine job of just that So the Blue Nile's world that they create happens in the wee small hours with the rain falling and the flickering city lights dancing on the now empty streets.

Built off of largely precise electronics, but especially with Buchanan's fragile voice, it always sounds intimate, warm, inherently melancholic, and really human.

What's in your rotation?

Right now, I'm obsessed with this... band called the Blue Nile.

And, Yeah, the lead singer, Paul Buchanan.

It's just like dreamy music.

The downtown lights.

That was The Downtown Lights by The Blue Nile.

They're a Glaswegian band.

When I put these songs together, I kind of, um, I thought it was gonna be sunny, um, or kind of like the end of the summer sun.

I remember that, you know, reading that he kind of was playing basement shows kind of maybe in like twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, and he makes music with his kind of, with his partner, and- Vocalist, uh, and I think there's something, there is something New York about it to me, but it just feels really specific.

I remember reading that he's into, you know, '80s artists like the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, but then grew up loving, like, Snip Lob and stuff.

So I think you can feel the kind of alchemy between all these different references, and that's how I make my music.

So I feel connected to people who are kind of shape-shifters and who make collages out of a lot of different, uh, references, I guess.

He has cast a great influence over many bands and will be playing some of the hallmark Dorothy Cullen tracks plus some of the bands he's influenced on this particular show.

And amongst bands influenced, we'll include the radio department, real estate, Mark McGuire, the Blue Nile, the clientele.

And what we're going to do is that thing that we often do on these occasions.

We're going to pair up.

Before that, you heard perhaps the most famous Dorotty Column track of all, and it's one of those occasions where the first track on the first album by an artist... holds that distinction and it is sketch for summer and sketch for dawn earlier and it's from the first album the return turn of the jurati column seems to be some some confusion as to whether that came out in 1979 or 1980 but uh it doesn't really matter either way does it now what we're going to do next is we're going to fast forward to the end of the 80s by this stage you'll see that there are some electronic sampling coming into the mix literally into the mix and so this next track will be from 1987 and we're going to pair it off with well you'll find out.

soul.

That's Headlights on the Parade by the Blue Nile from their classic 1989 album Enigmatically Called Hats.

It's got a poor cover, it's got a poor title but it's got some fantastic tracks and that's one of them.