MCQMUSICMONTHLY

The few things you may conceivably already know about Paul Buchanan are by far the least interesting: that he had a two-year relationship with the American actress Rosanna Arquette in the early nineties; that he sang lead vocal on Texas’s recent Top Ten single ‘Sleep’ (his part was played in the video by Peter Kay sporting fetching ginger dreadlocks); that his band, the Blue Nile, are renowned for the painstaking length of time it takes to make their records: a mere four albums in nearly 25 years.

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These bare facts are regularly trotted out as though they somehow contain the essence of both the music and the man. Buchanan, however, regards it all as mere frippery and he is probably right. After all, by far the most interesting thing about the Blue Nile’s singer and songwriter is the absolute sense of purpose and intent with which he approaches what he does; the stoical dedication to the ideal of what music could and should be. Neither stand-offish, stuck up or arrogant, he is nevertheless unafraid to wrestle with what he admits are “fancy dan” interpretations of his art, constantly aligning his aspirations to concepts of perfection before almost instantly shooting himself down as unworthy or incapable of achieving them. But at least, he seems to be saying, I try.

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Buchanan was born the son of a civil servant in Edinburgh, but grew up in Knightswood and Bishopbriggs in Glasgow and now lives in the city’s West End. He’s amusingly coy about his age but 50 fits. His handsome face is deeply lined but magnetic. It’s apt that the Blue Nile’s music is often described as cinematic, because there’s definitely a hint of the matinee idol about Buchanan, a touch of Gabriel Byrne, perhaps.

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He formed the Blue Nile in 1981 with fellow Glasgow University graduates Paul Joseph Moore (whom Buchanan has known since he was ten) and Robert Bell, and since the release of their landmark debut album, A Walk Across The Rooftops, in 1984, they have occupied a unique spot in the musical landscape. Through Hats (1989), Peace At Last (1996) and High (2004), they have honed and refined a sound which defies description, a fact that hasn’t prevented legions of rock critics from trying: from “ambient folk” and “electronic torch songs” to the “Scottish Sinatra”, words have never quite captured the lean, pulsing essence of their music. Perhaps their song titles are the best descriptive pointers: ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’; ‘The Downtown Lights’; ‘From A Late Night Train’; ‘Headlights On The Parade’.

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From the very beginning, Buchanan and the band sought to create pictures-in-sound analogous of neon, traffic and transient feelings of euphoria, or dread, or loneliness, or love, or faith: all the major emotional stopping points on an urban life journey. A dedicated and deliberate artistic ethos has been behind it all.

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“The shape was in the stone before we did the sculpture, it was a question of just looking in there,” says Buchanan over lunch in a Glasgow bar. “We would speak to each other in terms that were probably odd to people outside. We started to think about making the components of the music reflective of the subject matter and the atmosphere of the song, rather than just about playing an instrument. We liked the guitar on ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’ because it made us think of traffic. So it was the opposite of: there’s a G chord, then a B, an F, and a C. It was more visual.”

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The Blue Nile have never had a hit single but are revered. Their albums make brief visits to the Top Ten, they have had their songs covered by artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Annie Lennox, Robbie Robertson and Melanie Chisholm, and Buchanan is able to fill the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall three nights running later this month. And yet they have done it all virtually anonymously. He laughs at the memory of one record company employee trying to get them to appear on the children’s TV show Magpie — “Are you fucking insane?” was his considered response — and admits that part of the reason he and the other band members keep such a low profile, aside from what appears to be a natural shyness, is because, having spent so long creating a precise mood in their music, they don’t want their clumsy, “Marx Brothers antics” and very human-ness to get in the way.

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“Do you really want to switch on your TV and see your all-time hero selling a watch?” he says. “No. You want the complete experience. You need something to believe in. So we stayed out of the way. Listen, people I went to school with have recommended the records to me! We didn’t tell anybody we were in a group, we never rehearsed, we never went out anywhere. Nothing. We kept out of the way because I wanted people to think about a better world. I didn’t want them to be thinking about me.”

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He hasn’t been entirely successful. Such reticence only serves to increase the mystique and, inevitably, for those fans who picture Buchanan wandering in some perennial rain-soaked 4 a.m., constantly wrestling with his existential burden, the reality may be disappointing. He sits here in his Pringle sweater, with his glass of coke and his burger and chips, fretting about the boiler in the new flat he has just bought, two minutes across the road from the bar. He confesses that his public persona “makes me very nervous. I’m the opposite of the clown with the sad face. I don’t want to know. I just want to watch comedy movies all the time and buy hip-hop records. I don’t want deep thoughts. I have enough deep thoughts at work.”

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Despite the fact that he is possessed of an enviably emotive voice, Buchanan has never really regarded himself as a singer. Again, he sees what he does more in cinematic terms: playing a role, complementing the bigger picture, inserting words as though dialogue. However, since the last Blue Nile record in 2004 he has become more at ease with simply singing. He shrugs off the Texas collaboration — “it was a bit of an accident” — but is keener to talk about his recent shows with American trumpet player Chris Botti, where he performed alongside Burt Bacharach and Gladys Knight. He seems touched and surprised that “nobody seemed to have a terrible problem with me being there.” Only now is he beginning to feel he has “permission” to do what he does.

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Hence the solo shows, marking his first full public performances for nearly a decade. The Blue Nile — notoriously reclusive as a live act — threatened to tour after High but for one reason or another it never transpired and you can sense an underlying frustration. There seems to have been some tension within the group: although Bell will be appearing at the shows, Moore will not, and Buchanan is uncomfortable talking about the future of the band.

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“I think I’ll probably play with the Blue Nile again,” he ponders. “We’ve been together all this time, we grew up together, so it would be true to say we do love each other. Things don’t always go the way you want, in any relationship, but what I would be most loathe to do is put words into the mouth of someone that I love. At this juncture doing the show myself represents what I’ve been doing for the last few years. I wouldn’t want to mislead an audience and have them show up and not get what they wanted, so I thought I’d just do it as myself.”

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The Blue Nile only once really flirted with playing the conventional music industry game. After the release of Hats, their greatest record, in 1989, they found themselves caught in record industry crossfire in the UK and headed for the States, where the album had sold well. They undertook their first major tour. It was while living in Los Angeles that Buchanan met Rosanna Arquette. He sighs audibly when the subject comes up — as he knew it would — and politely tries to point out how odd it is that, more than a decade after the fact, he is still being asked about the experience of going out with an “alternative, hippie” girl who also happened to be a celebrity.

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“It’s like me saying to you, ‘Didn’t you used to go out with a lass ten years ago called Margaret? Well, tell me all about that.’ You want to say, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business!’ Every interview I’ve done has mentioned Rosanna, often with a photo of her. I’ve been with my girlfriend for five years and I wouldn’t like that if I was her, reading it over my cereal in the morning. Anyway, how can you possibly thumbnail it? I had just arrived in America and we were both really into music, and of course, I didn’t know her very well — you’re in a relationship before you even know the person. Rosanna’s peak moment had passed, so what I felt was support and compassion for her. Of course, it was fascinating to observe it. I would often say things like, ‘That looks just like Tom Cruise,’ and she’d say, ‘That is Tom Cruise, keep your voice down!’ So it was good and interesting and it ran its course. Rosanna subsequently got married and had a baby and I haven’t spoken to her for ages. I mean, I’ve had more interesting relationships.”

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After leaving America, Buchanan lived an itinerant life, spending time in Italy, Holland and France in the mid-’90s, writing and recording sporadically before moving on. He admits he can be a difficult man and that the romantic, glamorous view of life as espoused in his music can make the reality of relationships hard on the other person. “You imagine living up to that, the ethos in the records, and then expecting a normal person to be like that,” he smiles. “I think the whole romantic love thing sells us short, actually. Some damsel trotting through the forest on a horse and after you see her the skies open. Great. I love that! But it’s not fair on her, because you’ve made her up before you even know her. I’ve been guilty of that.”

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Nonetheless, he has recently shown signs of a change in his bachelor ways: he bought his first home this year, having lived in a succession of rented flats all his life. More significantly, his partner of five years has a ten-year-old son who he describes as “the light of my life. I totally love him.” One song on High, ‘I Would Never’, describes how he has ‘Raised our precious child/ To be a man.’ Is that, I wonder, about him? “Yeah, that’s him,” he smiles bashfully. “It’s the best relationship I’ve ever had and the thing I’m proudest of in my life. It’s been really good and really humbling because it’s nothing to do with me. I’d rather play Playstation with him than talk about show business, because his world is more interesting to me than my world is to him, which is great.”

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At the same time as claiming that his partner and her son are now the absolute emotional centre of his life, Buchanan quickly adds as a caveat, “we’re not married yet, and my lifestyle being what it is makes you selfish. In some way that I don’t absolutely get myself, I’ve spent twenty-odd years of my life doing this and I just haven’t quite done it yet. I haven’t quite finished.”

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To say Buchanan struggles with the significance of what he does would be an understatement. He veers between being rightfully proud and protective of his music, to being utterly dismissive of what he views as the self-absorption and irrelevance of it, half-jokingly lamenting the waste of much of his life. He studied English at University and once — and perhaps still does — held aspirations to be a writer. “I’ve tried many times, I’m just crap,” he shrugs. “It’s harder than it looks.” Nonetheless, he is more likely to cite Hemingway, Eliot, Fitzgerald or Hardy — or, indeed, Mahler or Puccini — as an influence than Bob Dylan. “The pop industry is that size to me,” he says. “I don’t care one way or the other about it.” Which is not, of course, the same thing as saying that he doesn’t take the music seriously. Indeed, Buchanan has what he calls a pseudo-divine attitude to music.

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“I could definitely say that being able to listen to music and being able to talk to each other through music is like being able to walk on air,” he says. “It’s like a miracle that we don’t really ever discuss. Why in the name of God can it reduce you to tears when one note goes ‘Ah’ and another note goes ‘Oh’ at the same time? Listening to melodies and going on these mini-journeys is so crucial, and it saddens me sometimes that music has just turned into a loss-leader in a supermarket. It’s like a miracle that has been turned into a marketing factor. I’m dumbfounded by it. Every record should be compared to silence — silence is perfect, what are you going to put on it?”

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With such an attitude, it’s little wonder that he gets weary when people constantly snipe about the length of time it has taken The Blue Nile to make their albums. He plays guitar or piano every day and writes a lot of songs, but goes through a lot of “dishwater ideas” before he gets a good one. The band has always had an uneasy relationship with the concept of ‘management’, so much time has been spent dealing with general maintenance, while they have encountered their fair share of record company indifference over the years. All of which, says Buchanan, draws the focus away from being “carefree” enough to work. But ultimately, the Blue Nile have set such high standards for themselves that nothing gets released until it is ready. Two whole albums have been scrapped in the past and the process has often been painful.

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“I did not want the best years of my life to be spent in cheap hotels so I could get back into the studio in the morning to do something you and I both know doesn’t matter,” he sighs. “We were in there for years trying to do something that was fundamentally believable and reassuring to the outside world. If you’re going to call somebody when you really have a problem then you want somebody that you fundamentally trust, and we try to do that on our records. We didn’t say, ‘That’s fine, it’s good enough, let’s go out and get laid.’ We’d look at each other and say, ‘Is that right? No? Right, see you Monday.’ People talk about us as if it’s self-indulgent, but there were a lot of sacrifices. I was not in a Jacuzzi. I was in a studio in East Lothian!”

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Buchanan undertook bits and bobs of work — tutoring, press for the Citizens Theatre and 7:84 — after graduating, but has made a full time living out of the Blue Nile since 1983. It’s no small achievement, and he confesses that, with the amount of time between albums, the money gets “stretched and stretched and stretched. If you’d made that amount of money in a year you’d be driving a nice car. But if you make that money in six years, you’re still on the bus, you know? I don’t make a great living. I’m not rich, but I have a nice life.”

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He visualises his musical career as describing an arc of five records, which means one more. Then he’d like to do something different. “I feel like I’ve spend too much time thinking about the Blue Nile and myself,” he claims. He has high hopes for the final album, planning to make something that doesn’t refer in any way to the previous work. At present, though, Buchanan is at the “kitchen table” stage and can only talk about it in the most vague conceptual terms.

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“What I hope to do is express ludicrous joy and ludicrous optimism, because the euphoria has become muted,” he says softly. “I used to have a basic belief in the goodness of everything, and all I want to do is get to the point where I can re-express that. I think too often I’ve taken the glass half-empty view. That’s the downside of where we come from and some of our culture: an inhibition and an unwillingness to celebrate. Because actually, what I want is for someone to come home from their work and throw their jacket off and not be able to get to the CD fast enough because they want pizzazz. If I had one thing left to say and one second left to say it, I would just be saying, ‘Good luck. Whatever our differences are, wasn’t it excellent being alive?’” His burger lies half-congealed and his chips have long since cooled. He picks up his fork anyway. “Just opening our eyes once, wasn’t that unbelievable?”

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Please view the original Medium.com article via the link provided above.

First published 2006.

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MCQMUSICMONTHLY

FEATURE  MAY  2024