The sense of isolation was in direct contrast to
the way the Blue Nile operated. On their first two albums in particular, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982) and Hats (1988), Buchanan and fellow bandmates Robert Bell and PJ Moore were "a group of
real friends, truly democratic". They wanted the songs "to be better versions of
us – of everything. We wanted to make pictures, so we tried to remove ourselves
from the fabric of it, to get out of the way of the music." He laughs. "I'm not
sure why we gave ourselves such a Herculean task…"
By the release of their fourth album, High (2004), the dynamic had changed. Aptly, the band that famously never did
anything in a hurry fell apart in slow motion. There were no fist fights, no
screaming matches; instead, everything gradually drifted to a halt. The phone
stopped ringing. Nobody was organising rehearsals. Although he was hurt,
Buchanan was aware that "it had been going that way for a long time. You
can hear it. We could all hear it. To me, High is a stoic record – it sounds
like we were trying to stick with each other and do our best to survive. Some of
the unfettered joy had gone. Some kind of magic had slipped away from us, and
some of the hope that we started out with. We adhered to each other until we had
finished the record, but maybe individually and collectively we weren't as happy
as we had been."
Engineered by the son of Blue Nile producer Calum
Malcolm, Mid Air was mostly recorded in Buchanan's flat, working "civilised
hours" over a couple of years. Half-joking, he likens the process to Ted
Hughes's "sacred trance": the songs appeared almost by accident while he was
"banging away" in an attempt to come up with something for Garbage singer Shirley Manson, who had approached him to collaborate on her – as yet unmade – solo
record. "Shirley is lovely and I really wanted to get what she wanted, but
nothing came out of it in the end. It was only when I looked back I thought,
I've got all these little things that I've just noted and put to one side."
The Blue Nile famously laboured over their records: four albums in 22 years is hardly a prolific batting average. Mid Air, too, comes a full eight years after High. Buchanan says he has no problem coming up with material, so why does the process take so long? "You work and work and work and have the life that you have, and once in a while, sometimes once in a decade, you see a few things you've got and think, yes, that's authentic. You try to stay true to that little moment whatever the costs." Such is the distance, it seems, between simply writing songs and chasing starlight.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/10/paul-buchanan-lost-blue-nile?INTCMP=SRCH
