Hats (lost unreleased songs from The Blue Nile album; 1984-1989)

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BlueNileHatsUnreleasedTracks-CoverArt.jpg

Album cover.

Status: Lost

Hats is The Blue Nile's second album, released on 16 October 1989 by Linn Records and A&M Records. The album was released to critical acclaim and became their most successful album. It reached number 12 on the UK album charts and spawned three singles: The Downtown Lights, Headlights on the Parade, and Saturday Night.

Recording

In 1985, after their first album promotion, Linn Records asked the band to produce a follow-up album. They were sent to a house near the Castlesound Studios in Gullane, a golfing resort town. However, they faced several problems from the start. They did not have enough material to make another album and were forced to share a house which made them homesick. Consequently, arguments developed among the band members. To add to their woes, Virgin Records, to whom Linn had licensed the Blue Nile's records, began legal proceedings against Linn Records, demanding new material. Paul Buchanan said, "Living away from home, no money, miserable, getting sued. We were absolutely zonked, the record company weren't pleased and everyone around was starting to think, this record is never going to get made. It was exhausting."[1]

The Blue Nile spent three years in Castlesound studio but failed to produce anything. They left to make way for another Virgin band, It's Immaterial, to record their second album. Both bands had trouble making their records, leading to overrunning their allotted time. The Blue Nile returned to Glasgow and overcame their writer's block. Robert Bell and Paul Joseph Moore worked on musical ideas on a portastudio. As a result, when the band finally returned to Castlesound in 1988, the ideas for the album were already in place, and according to Buchanan, "We knew exactly what we were doing. We actually recorded the rest of Hats super quick ... Honestly, half of Hats was, like, a week."[1]

In an interview, Buchanan reflected on the time lost making the album:

"We pretty much put the record [A Walk Across the Rooftops] out, promoted it, and then the next thing we knew we were back in the studio. That whole gestation period had gone missing. We didn't really have the songs. We labored away in the studio trying to generate the material there, which just didn't work. We recorded but we just didn't believe in what we'd recorded ... I think people perceived it as it was all to do with us sort of being in the studio for five years, but of course, you couldn't be in the studio for five years, you'd lose your mind. There was a two-year period where we would have gone back in, but we couldn't get back in! So, when we got back, we actually finished Hats quickly. The period when we got bumped out the studio, we had nothing else to do, so we packed up and went home. Which is what we should have done in the first place, because when we went back home, we reverted to our old routines—practice, play, and sit about each other's little flats and talk things through. We should have done that to begin with, really."[2]

Status

The original unreleased tracks have never surfaced, and Paul Buchanan has never elaborated on what became of them. When the album was remastered and re-released in 2012, many fans anticipated the second disc containing the missing tracks, but it didn't.[3] Almost nothing is known about any of the scrapped songs.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Thomson, Graeme (January 2013). "River of No Return". Uncut. No. 188. London. pp. 56–60.
  2. https://www.clashmusic.com/features/tinseltown-in-the-rain-the-blue-nile
  3. Hats (CD liner notes). The Blue Nile (remastered ed.). Virgin Records. 2012. LKHCDR 2.

External Link