Allan Brown

There is something magnificent about the sheet doggedness of The Blue Nile's adherence to the unorthodox trajectory of their singular career' Richard Williams. The Guardian `The Blue who? Oh my God. I've never heard of them' Chris Martin, Coldplay A riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a raincoat. The Blue Nile are one of the most adored. yet perplexing, outfits in the history of British music. The band's work - a blend of Brian Eno and disco, the balladry of Sinatra and serial composition: of film soundtrack. Kraftwerk and musique concrete - is treasured for its aching romanticism and its evocation of late-night melancholy: for being, as one critic put it. pop music's answer to Venice. The band formed at Glasgow University in 1981, and their album A Walk Across The Rooftops went on to become one of the most acclaimed debuts in pop history. But the high wasn't to last. Conditioned by the low-gear perfectionism of songwriter Paul Buchanan and by the bizarre Gordian knots of its method the band took five years to make its next record. Over the strange course of three decades and four albums - A Walk Across The Rooftops, Hats, Peace At Last and High - The Blue Nile were to produce a rough average of just one song a year. In this first full-length biography Allan Brown examines how the band's austere idealism gave way to the emotional mutinies of middle-age; and how the hive mind of its three founders disassociated under the pressures of acclaim and adulation, of self-effacement and self-doubt. The story of stoppable forces meeting moveable objects. Nileism examines the heartbreakingly human side of the music industry: `It costs you everything' says Paul Buchanan now. `Everything goes away: your relationships go, everything goes. It all goes. And coming down is hell.'

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