Inside the long shadow of The Blue Nile, whose second album Hats is available now in our webshop.

The flat was small and rectangular, so narrow, recalled singer Paul Buchanan, “we used to have to stand in a line to practice because it wasn’t wide enough.” In that cramped Glasgow space, the Blue Nile pieced together songs late into the night — carefully, quietly, chasing a feeling more than a sound until “somehow or other, the music sort of gets in between your sentences and expresses something that with language we can still find difficult, maybe it’s soul,” said Buchanan. “You hear a great song, and you’re thinking ‘I felt that.’”

That was the measure the Blue Nile held themselves to. “We had very definite ideas about the music we wanted to create,” Buchanan recalled to NME as Hats was coming out, “and we realized that it couldn’t be done in half measures, so we quit our jobs and knuckled down to a whole year of concentrated rehearsing and demo-ing.” Out of that thin room came works that continue to stop listeners in their tracks: A Walk Across the Rooftops (1984) and Hats (1989). Rooftops sketches out a city at night in sharp, glowing lines. Hats moves slower, deeper. The sound is sleek, the emotion is not. Below, Buchanan offers a tour of the area in Glasgow where they rehearsed.

We’ve celebrated the Blue Nile before — often, and with good reason. But Hats is in the shop on vinyl right now, and that alone feels like a reason to pause and revisit. For those who know it, no introduction is needed. For those who don’t, this is a rare chance to hear a record that doesn’t belong to any one genre, era, or mood. Just seven perfectly weighted songs that seem to unfold inside the listener, quietly, lastingly, and on their own terms.

The band never officially broke up, but by 2005, it was over. As they prepared to tour behind High, Buchanan and Bell realized Moore had gone quiet and wouldn’t be joining them. That was the last time The Blue Nile operated as a trio.

“Neither me nor Robert have seen nor heard from him much at all really, to be honest,” Buchanan told The Quietus in 2012. “There was some paperwork that had to be signed recently, so we all did it, as straightforwardly as we could. It’s a mystery to some extent… Half the time I sort of expect Paul to just show up, you know.” A year later, speaking to The Guardian, he added: “I love PJ and there isn’t a month goes by where I don’t think about phoning him.”

Moore, less nostalgic, told the Irish Independent in 2022: “There were three of us in this marriage and the sex was rubbish.” Still, he offered a line both sides seem to stand by: “We poured all of ourselves into [the records]. You can’t ask much more than that.”

The 2024 Hats reissue (on Confetti Records) is available in the shop now — seven tracks, beautifully cut, quietly essential. Order it online here. If you want to hear the band in their own words — young, soft-spoken, and just beginning — check out this 1985 interview on KCRW’s SNAP! with Deirdre O’Donoghue. It’s one of their earliest radio appearances, and one of the best.