Fairly easy and a thing of gaps, a thing of punctuations:ġ984 is A Walk Across The Rooftops (three years have already elapsed since their first single I Love This Life which doesn’t appear/wouldn’t fit on the album – the sound is nearly there, the roots are showing but it’s a little more frantic than they would ever need to be).Īs debuts go, it’s as definitive as any, it’s as great as any. And a Blue Nile chronology is fairly easy. So, let’s talk about The Blue Nile, out of order as the list certainly isn’t chronological. There may be only just over fifty songs across five albums – and across what is now moving into a fifth decade since the release of the instantly stunning A Walk Across The Rooftops way back in 1984, an outbreak of beauty that Orwell didn’t see coming, but why would you want to only expose the world to twenty per cent of them? Because this is my list and I can set the rules.Īnd, since I’m setting the rules, the ten is a 15.Īmerican Music Club’s Everclear: A lost album that deserves to be foundīecause you can’t whittle genius away to pre-set limits. One of The Blue Nile’s greatest song isn’t even a Blue Nile song. The Blue Nile’s greatest song isn’t on either of those two stone-cold classics. The latter two are Blue Nile albums but they’re not THE albums the shock of the new has gone, we know what the group sound like, there’s nothing left that they can do that can surprise us, nothing that can add to the glory already gone. The first two albums are the classics, we all know that. It’s as beautiful as you want life to be. Will we always be happy go lucky?”Ī query that has an answer that we’ll come to later. Tinseltown may well be one of the greatest songs ever written by human beings (spoiler here: it is), a rhapsody, a quest, a tale of the city, “tall buildings reach up in vain”, a rumination on love lost, lives lived in small moments, how we all intersect and the greatest question ever asked in music: It’s not that easy, it’s not that obvious and no, I haven’t. Take ten minutes and the only argument will be whether I put Tinseltown at number one. Well, it’s Hats plus Stay and Tinseltown In The Rain plus one and we’re sorted. ‘How do you fancy doing a top ten for The Blue Nile?’ Glaswegian three-piece The Blue Nile weigh heavily on the mind of Getintothis’ Ian Salmon who tries to corral their work into a top ten and fails – so here is a top 15.

Cold Magics by Erik Buchanan