The Blue Nile 'A Walk Across The Rooftops' Vinyl LP 1983 VG

£ 45

$ 60

£ 45 Sold For

Feb 13, 2021 Sold Date

Feb 5, 2021 Start Date

1 Number Of Bids

Great Britain Country Of Seller

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Description

The Blue Nile 'A Walk Across The Rooftops' Vinyl LP 1983 VG. Great 1983 copy of a classic album, some damage to sleeve due to stupid shop sticker! Record itself is in great condition and plays amazingly well.
Tracklist:
A1 A Walk Across The Rooftops 4:54 A2 Tinseltown In The Rain 5:53 A3 From Rags To Riches 5:59
B1 Stay 4:55 B2 Easter Parade 4:29 B3 Heatwave 6:26 B4 Automobile Noise 5:08
About this record:
Still a landmark, still high, still somehow intangible: The Blue Nile didn’t sound or function like any normal band.
1984’s A Walk Across the Rooftops remains unique in its fusion of chilly technology and a pitch of confessional, romantic soul that ‘alternative’ types would usually shy away from for fear it wasn’t ‘cool’. It was always (at least) two things at once: in the years since, its peerless power to affect has accrued multiple layers of rueful resonance.
Now reissued, as the 1983 copies are hard to track down, its hopeful melancholy transcends its era like an Edward Hopper painting. Synthesisers, the 80s’ new toy, abound, but are used with such naïve grace, over rhythms both simple and circuitous, that they refuse to date.
More importantly, as has been reaffirmed on this year’s stripped-down solo psalm Mid Air, Paul Buchanan’s enraptured voice and words capture the essence of hearts breaking and healing as well as anyone outside Tamla Motown’s heyday.
People tend to flag up The Blue Nile’s Scottishness, as if geography and accidents of birth were responsible for artistic vision; but surely, again like Hopper, the dreams and tears here are universal. The city streets, cars, rooftops, rain, couples and love documented and expressed so delicately throughout the seven songs are potentially everywhere, any time, “caught up in this big rhythm”. This is why the band stood out then and hover above now; both everymen and angels.
With the bubbling, chugging, almost unbearably yearning Tinseltown in the Rain (“I know now, love was so exciting”) following the opening title track, the album is within minutes an epic noir movie, despite its modesty. The white-funk guitar line that breaks into the latter is a marvel of rule-breaking juxtaposition.
Stay and Heatwave are heroically restrained; Easter Parade and Automobile Noise are elegies full of ghosts and blood.