Sweat breaks out like a rash on our proprietor. His hands shake. Now, why is our usually ebullient Mr. D so nervous?
Sweat breaks out like a rash on our proprietor. His hands shake. Now, why is our usually ebullient Mr. D so nervous?
(this is their new album – go buy it!)
The setting is a hotel bar deep in Amsterdam. A nervous Mr. Dekel meets a relaxed, urbane Mr. Buchanan, lead singer in the legendary Blue Nile. Sweat breaks out like a rash on our proprietor. His hands shake. Now, why is our usually ebullient Mr. D so nervous?
Jon Dekel; "Ermm, I have to admit that the arts editor wrote these questions, as he’s a huge fan of yours, but he couldn’t make it today. I’m sorta standing in So if I sound a bit hesitant…"
Paul Buchanan; "Fire away, don’t you worry".
IN: The Blue Nile music always seemed to have a lot of filmic elements to it. There’s a mix of highly personal vignettes, epic, "Gone with the Wind" sound sweeps, titles like Easter Parade, Walk Across the Rooftops…
PB: (after a long pause) I’m gonna fail that question… God, this’ll sound pretentious, but with each of our songs, we try visually to create the context of the monologue. I mean, if you see somebody standing on a bridge, you want to describe the bridge, the background, and so on; the whole picture. So we are trying to suggest, visually, the context of the song.
IN: The band seemed to arrive out of nowhere with Walk Across The Rooftops in the early eighties. Did you feel aligned to any particular musical cohort back then?
PB: No.
JD: So what is it you were trying to achieve?
PB": I think that…hmmm… (long silence)
IN: Okay, let me re-phrase that. Were you trying to create a separate stance from the other bands around?
PB: I don’t think we felt any competition with other groups. I think that we were genuinely working in isolation anyway. We weren’t really socially involved and we were against the whole ethos of being in a band, which means hanging around a coffee shop all day trying to pick up girls… I mean there’s nothing wrong with that, but we were more hard-line, and I think we were more affiliated to cinema and books than to other music around.
I think that, especially with pop music, there’s an in-built merit and de-merit. Merit in the fact that it’s constantly referring to itself, but a de-merit in that you are constantly reliving the past also, and it becomes acceptable to plunder the immediate past.
I mean…we don’t need another revival of five minutes ago, (laughs)…
I guess, as in anything creative, things take their own course and you follow it and it would be honest to say that the music we made was circumstantial and was based on the personnel, and the absence of other personnel.
IN: So you honed your vision in the studio
PB: We still regard ourselves as amateurs really, so its not… I mean, every time we go to a guitar store, everyone can play the guitar better than me, everybody; (laughs). Even the doorman can play better than me. So it was circumstantial really, you use the skills that you have. We defined stuff as we worked. And, as you worked, you wanted to experiment with the space you found in the music. We began to realize that you could imply a lot more in the work than merely stating it.
IN: So you mean keeping guitar solos simple, that kinda thing?
PB: If you buy a new book you don’t really need the intro to give you the attributes of every single character within. Your brain fills it in more sympathetically and more accurately, so I think that’s where we were at.
IN: A change of tack now. Did you distance yourself from the Postcard scene?
PB: We liked them; we knew some of them and I still know some of them. We definitely admired them and their ethos, (in terms of having no money and trying to do something different); I mean we shared that aim, but our goals were totally different. They tried to achieve something that was engagingly raw, almost chaotic, they played in bars and we went to see them. And it was chaos! It was…fruity! We, on the other hand, were trying to do something different; to delineate post war western society with one amp and one cabinet! (laughs).
IN: "What a way to do it"
PB: "It was the only way. We were hardcore!
IN: So what do you feel about this Postcard revival with bands such as Franz Ferdinand?
PB: Well, we exist parallel, it’s not our culture. We like them well enough, it’s just not our thing, that’s all. This constant referencing is okay up to a point, and Franz Ferdinand do it well, better than others, they’ve mixed the ingredients together well, and in their own way, but I suppose it’s the intentional references….
What that does is it evokes other groups, and that’s not what we want to do; I mean, you’re sitting around listening and you think "oh, that’s kinda good, that bit’s like Talking Heads and it’s kinda like this and that", and I wish they would send us some money!
We wanted to wipe the blackboard clean and to begin again. We wanted people to reflect on their own experiences through the music.
IN: Hmm… this sounds like more of a personal point from the editor. I’ll read it anyway. ‘I remember hearing Tinseltown in the Rain on Radio 1 whilst working in a factory. I remember finding that a really weird scenario. How do feel now you do all the promo stuff you never did before?’
PB: I think you take each experience as presented to you. Our attitude has always been… I’ll give you an example. If someone says, ‘Hey do you want to go to Amsterdam, do interviews and walk round a little?’ Of course you say yes, but you don’t really think about it much…
I think on some subconscious level we were aware of the fact that we had to protect our own space. And that was important. I don’t understand why you turn your back on some sort of commercial career in terms of being a banker or whatever, but then you try and recreate the same criteria through art. If I wanted to sell out, I would have chosen another profession".
IN: You don’t seem to have that much ego as a band
PB: I think you have to go with the flow. I don’t feel we are in competition with anybody. (Pauses). Fame is a doubtful thing. You know, we have absolute faith in what we do, so we don’t need any affirmation. Also, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword…
As Shakespeare said, ‘portray yourself’. And it has been important for us to maintain outsider status, to give us the freedom to do the work we want to do. We are still, I think, amateurs; but there’s a liberty in that. It’s not my job to maintain a trajectory of sales, its my job to do something that if it’s honest and free of self advertisement, then there’s a chance that it can reach someone else’s subconscious. If I embroider or personalize it in anyway, I could eliminate that chance
IN: You want to keep that close link with your audience
PB: You can tell with the records. The records I love, you can hear that the people who made them didn’t have a check list of ambitions they wanted to fulfill. They were engaged in the process of making a record and that, to me, seems pure…
As with many things in life, it’s difficult to get over the idea of the last three words spoken… Everybody wants to know now, things like, you know, ‘oh, these people, what kind of sweaters do they wear, or their haircuts, or do they like the Velvet Underground’ it’s all so truncated. I think the aspirations of pop music are reduced because of that. And that’s not us. Or our audience. You have to go ahead and do it for love".
IN: Blue Nile‘s music seems to hit a vulnerable point in a lot of people. Why do you think that is?
PB: I think that it is because people, us too, have vulnerable points. You know, it’s not good enough everybody trying to be a celebrity, it’s not enough, it’s too divisive. All this ‘if you’re not in you’re out’, it’s terrible…
IN: What do you feel like when people like Sting laud you? Do you feel you have something they don’t have in your music?
PB: Other musicians have always been very supportive of us and helpful to us in practical ways, and I think that’s because they see what we’re trying to do. They understand the decisions we had to make in order to make the work we made; to give it the shape it has…It’s too easy to say this is purely down to the technical or sonic aspects. It’s less to do with the technicalities and more to do with the way we play our instruments. It’s not difficult to learn the guitar. It’s less easy to make a guitar sound like a city, (laughs). You had to forgo many things to do that. Making it look easy and unnoticeable is where the real work comes in. And the other musicians, they understood that we had to work extremely hard.
We always felt sure of ourselves and resolved enough to see it through. We were the guys in school who, if somebody’s giving you a hard time, would go and speak to them for you. You must concede that we never flinched once.
IN: It’s as if you were always fighting the ‘single, album, tour’ treadmill. Is that fair, or are you reacting to your muse in the way she demands?
PB: I’m reacting to the muse really.
IN: Do you find the process of creating an album worthy of more consideration?
PB: You set out on day one and I don’t necessarily hope it’s all concluded quickly…you know, writing a book is presumably more fulfilling than going to the cheese and wine launch party. You set out with a good intention and openness. And you stick with it until, for better or for worse, you know it’s finished. What we were anxious to do was to make a short economic curve over our entire career. I don’t want to clutter up the universe with my twelve bar blues when Robert Johnson’s twelve bar blues are much better.
IN: So why another LP now?
PB: We’ve been working on it for a long time! Part of the motivation with this record was that beforehand, we were seduced out of politeness as much as anything else. We kinda went along with things for a little while and I think in doing that we went along with expectations… from corporations…Half way through that we realized that it wasn’t working, nobody was happy; us, the record company, so…I think it would be fair to say that we went back to where we came from. We hadn’t lived in Scotland for years, but we went back, to Glasgow. Which is like a mini Chicago. We’d go back and regain ourselves.
IN: Okay, last question; and again it’s one of those personal ones; hmm…I’ll read this out. ‘I’ve always tried to find your mythical lost first single I Love This Life. I’ve heard snippets, but can’t find it anywhere. You could at least put it on your website so we could all hear it’
PB: You know, so many people were asking about it that we put it on the b side of our current single, the new single from this record! So, (laughing) I’m sure he’ll play it to his hearts content
IN: Oh, he will, I can assure you of that
PB: That’s good. What’s his name anyway?…