Blue Nile singer in slow flow

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Paul Buchanan released four albums in 30 years with his band. Now he has finally put out Mid Air, his first solo effort, says Ed Power

PAUL Buchanan was terrified. “I was booked to appear on Jools Holland and all I could think was that I’d forget the words to the song,” says the downbeat Scottish singer. “Before my performance, I sat there, watching the other acts. I could almost feel the lyrics leaving my head. It was pretty scary.”

His worries were in vain. With Holland on piano, Buchanan breezed through the title track from his new solo album, Mid Air. It was bleak, beautiful and wondrous: a haiku of melancholy gift-wrapped in gorgeous melodies.

“I was glad Jools offered to play along,” says Buchanan, a week after the event. “It’s a while since I did anything in a live context. I wasn’t too confident about singing and playing piano at the same time. Fair enough, the version we did is not the same as the recorded one. It isn’t meant to be. It is its own thing. You can’t try to recreate something on stage.”

Buchanan has the sunken gaze and waxy pallor of someone who’s been up all night (in fact, he is freshly rested and reinforced with cigarettes and coffee).

He is hoarse, rumpled and vaguely sad, as if he’s received bad news.

This is as you’d expect if you are familiar with his band, The Blue Nile. Over four albums and 30 years, the Scottish trio perfected a heavy hearted romanticism, a sound grounded in weeping synths, keening pianos and Buchanan crooning like the loneliest guy on the planet. Nobody is two-dimensional and, alongside the world-weariness, Buchanan’s patter is laced with flinty Glasgow wit. He is excited about watching soccer on TV this evening, for instance, asking which pubs have the best big screens. He is also self-deprecating, forever breaking into laconic chuckles.

“I worked with a well-known Scottish singer, who shall remain nameless,” he says. “She was in my house and was going through my DVDs. And she stopped and said, ‘all the movies in your collection are comedies — what’s going on there?’ Well, there’s a constant strain of humour in what we did. We are entirely heartfelt. At the same time, we know how to have a laugh as well. That’s important, I think.”

The Blue Nile had always been an intermittent affair. The group worked at their own, glacial pace, putting out an album only after fans had started to give up hope that they would ever emerge from the studio again.

But decades of history together finally unravelled in 2005, when keyboard player PJ Moore cut off contact with Buchanan and guitarist Robert Bell.

The surprise disintegration was hugely upsetting to the two remaining members. Even now, Buchanan doesn’t understand what happened. Speaking about it, his features crease up with emotion.

“I’m still not sure how this has all come to pass with the Blue Nile,” he says. “Two of us wanted to continue doing it. I don’t get why the third chap wasn’t there any more. The last gigs we played together … we had realised he wasn’t going to come back in the foreseeable future. I felt sad. Robert did, too. Not least because we had worked so hard. If he had wanted to be there, we’d loved to have had him.”

Buchanan never planned on a solo album. He was producing an album for an unnamed friend — he is cloak and dagger about his extracurricular work — when, unbidden, all these songs started coming to him.

“I had a wee dictaphone and note book beside the piano. I didn’t want to ruin my concentration, so I’d pop the idea on the tape and carry on,” he says.

These snatches were adding up to something significant. “Half my brain was thinking ‘hang on, you’re supposed to be doing this other thing’. The other half was thinking ‘wait a minute, you’ve got something interesting here’. “I was trying to process what was, or wasn’t, happening with the band,” he says.

“At the time, I didn’t think I was making a solo thing. I tried to obey whatever came out. I didn’t approach it as I would a Blue Nile album. I didn’t feel an obligation to put in another chorus.

“What I thought was, ‘if there’s some truth here, my job is to get out of the way and let the songs speak for themselves’. It doesn’t sound like the Blue Nile. It’s more solitary. Well, it would be. It was recorded in a very solitary way,” he says.

When Buchanan finished, he was seized by the sense he’d done something wrong. He worried, in fact, that he’d committed the biggest misstep of his professional life. “As soon as you’re done, you think, ‘oh my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake’. You want to undo everything. And it’s too late, of course. I don’t know — I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that I’ve actually even made a solo LP. I’m still processing that,” he says.

With five records in 35 years, Buchanan’s reputation as a perfectionist is carved in marble. He understands why people might consider him obsessive in the studio. The truth is more complex.

“The Blue Nile always pursued authenticity,” he says. “When you are under any kind of spotlight, it knocks you off your track a little, knowing people are watching. Maybe some anxiety crept in. Nobody could spend the amount of time we did trying to get something right.

“It was more that, if we felt a song wasn’t 100% there, we’d scrap it. Your fans will forgive you if something isn’t as good as a track you’ve done before. They won’t forgive you if you do something fake. The first time you do that, you’ve lost them.”

* Mid Air is out now. Paul Buchanan plays Liss Ard Festival, Skibbereen, Co Cork, Aug 4- 5 Home