INTRO
A WALK ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS (Linn Records/A&M, 1984)
There’s a lot to be said for having very little to work with. When this Glasgow-based trio of Paul Buchanan, PJ Moore and Robert Bell started out in the early 1980s, working on eclectic cover versions of Motown and Beatles numbers, they had little more than an organ, a guitar or two and a basic synth between them. By making a virtue out of necessity they developed a sparse, minimalist style of songwriting that was big on open spaces and ambiguity. Temperamentally adverse to rhapsodic flourishes, grandstanding solos or any of the usual trappings and affectations of pop and rock at the time, spaciousness and restraint were very much the principles guiding the making of the band’s 1984 debut album, A Walk Across The Rooftops.
Just as the Japanese haiku draws its subject’s very essence through the briefest of phrases and lines, The Blue Nile scraped away any superfluous or unnecessary elements to produce a sequence of just seven songs spanning a little over 37 minutes. A Walk Across The Rooftops is an album peppered with small events that make a subtle but telling impact on the bigger picture. Anticipating the sepulchral ambience Talk Talk would later explore, the trio, with the aid of drummer Nigel Thomas and recording engineer Calum Malcolm, painstakingly sculpted a distinctive soundworld. Blending a mixture of naturally derived or synthetically generated small, atmospheric sounds, they created an ambiguous backdrop on the tracks, a kind of shimmering ambient heat-haze from which these lean, almost skeletal songs gradually take shape. For example, album closer Automobile Noise opens with what at first sounds like a car door slamming shut in some deserted, cavernous garage only for it to become the main percussive beat driving
