Paul Buchanan, frontman with 1980s purveyors of emotional indie music The Blue Nile, has released his first solo album. 'I just didn't want to disappoint anybody,' he tells BRIAN BOYD
‘Some days when I wake up I’ll be down in the kitchen staring out the window and I think to myself: ‘What is it I do again?’” Paul Buchanan may have (with The Blue Nile) been responsible for some of the most emotionally evocative music ever released but there’s still a part of him that’s forever distant. And forever doubting.
“When I finished this album [Mid Air – his first solo offering] I thought I had made a massive mistake,” he says as he sits in a Dublin hotel. “It may be a small album and the songs are very brief but it still kept me awake at night. When I finished it I just thought: ‘Oh no, this is all wrong’. It’s just me and a piano but I thought it needed drums, bass and a guitars. I thought it needed mixing properly. But that’s what you get when you find yourself always concerned with the quality of the work – with its integrity and purpose”.
His worries about Mid Air reflect the fact that it is a rush-release (by his standards) in that it only took a few years to complete. Famously, The Blue Nile only released four albums in a 20-year recording career – and the gap between their third and fourth releases was longer than the entire recording career of The Beatles.
Considering that Buchanan once told me that if he had his way he would still be working on A Walk Across The Rooftops (the band’s 1984 album), it’s a shock to discover how extravagantly munificent Mid Air is. There are (count them) 14 songs on it. Your excitement, though, is tempered somewhat when you realise that 13 of the songs come in at less than three minutes.
In as much as you can call an album from a 56-year-old a mid-life crisis affair then Mid Air is just that – minus the melodrama.
“It’s really an accident,” he says of the album. “A friend commissioned me to do some work and I just set up a Dictaphone by the piano to record what I was doing. It started off very slowly but I think unconsciously I wanted to make a record. The songs weren’t written by an act of will – they just occurred to me as I went along”.
The mid-life-crisis element was provided by the sudden death of a very close friend. “Things like that make you stop and question,” he says. “I was having a very introspective moment when I made the album. It was a period of reflection. But it’s not about tragedy, it’s about loss. And it’s about naïve dreams and expectations. I think there’s two types of innocence, the one you’re born with and the one you can try to return to when you make a decision to reclaim it. But the big thing here I think is that there is no sophistry – ‘Abandon all sophistry’ became a sort of motto for the album”.
He wanted to call the album Minor Poets of the 17th Century but thought it was too unwieldy so went for Mid Air instead. “I was in an Oxfam book shop in Glasgow and came across the book Minor Poets of the 17th Century book and I immediately thought ‘That’s me right there!’”
It’s by no means a Blue Nile record – it’s far too sparse – but there are obvious reminders of his work with the group, particularly on My True Country when he sings: “Far above the chimney tops/Take me where the bus don’t stop”.
“I didn’t even begin to try to make this sound like the band” he says. “It’s more of a record-ette than anything else”.
An unofficial biography of the band, Nileism, written by Glasgow journalist Allan Brown two years ago concluded that the three band members are no longer on speaking terms and the band is essentially broken up. “I didn’t read the book,” says Buchanan. “There are some myths out there about The Blue Nile and sometimes they make too good a story – whether they’re true or not. What’s happening with The Blue Nile is that we never sat down and broke up. There were never any harsh words. I’m optimistic there will be another album.”
There have already been ecstatic murmurings about Mid Air from strung-out Blue Nile fans. It’s always been a characteristic of the band that although their fan base may be only a fraction of that of your average reality TV show act, there’s a formidable devoutness at play. Buchanan once told me: “When we get that type of response it can be a bit worrying because I’m the sort of person who even if we’re playing a sold-out show somewhere I still see the empty seat and wonder and worry about that. The level it gets to in the US with the fans can freak me out”.
In his native and beloved Glasgow it’s a different story. “If ever I do get recognised I tend just to get a quiet nod from people,” he says. “In Glasgow we have this expression ‘Big Man’ which is used as a compliment and I get that a bit, which is lovely.
“I also get the odd ‘Didn’t you used to be in The Blue Nile?’ or I get people who think I’m just back on holiday, that I live in Miami or somewhere”.
There’s a great story in the biography Nileism which has Buchanan meeting up with an old school friend in Glasgow. The conversation turns to music and the friend tells Buchanan about this amazing band called The Blue Nile that he really should listen to.
“People respond to the emotion in the music I think” he says. “I never really got that ‘melancholy’ thing which is always hung around us. As I said, the songs just occur to me and they usually begin with overhearing something in a Glasgow street.
“There’s a song on this called Two Children and that began with me overhearing an argument between two people. That just rolled around in my mind for a long time before it became a song”.
“They’re all about domestic situations and personal lives. And you’re just hoping for that alchemy to come into play to make it a song. I know the work-rate has been ludicrous over the years but the thing for me has always been – right from the very start – I just didn’t want to disappoint anybody”.
Mid Air is released on May 18
