Day 23. Tomorrow I will be there, oh you wait and see (23/1/19)

(Soundtrack: The Blue Nile's 1990 masterpiece 'Hats'. All Blue Nile albums are masterpieces. There aren't many and it's taken a long time for there to not be many but how can you measure beauty in time and quantity?)

The Blue Nile have had a place in our lives forever. They've had a place in my life slightly longer than J's but from the moment we were first together they were present in our background. From the day we moved in together, from the moment we were married, for the first four years of our married life, for the entirety of our time in our second house, in our home in Leeds, they were our soundtrack. Later 'God Bless You Kid' from the also wondrous 'Peace At Last' would be the soundtrack to the earliest months of our first son.

The Blue Nile's debut, 'A Walk Across The Rooftops', is genuinely the only album I've ever bought on the strength of a review in a music paper without having heard a single note. I don't know if it was NME or Melody Maker but it spoke of real strings at a time when the whole world was synthesised. It spoke of beauty and it spoke of heartbreak and wonder.

The romantic in me was never going to miss out on that.

The album was all that was promised and so much more.

In Stay and the sumptuous Tinseltown In The Rain it had two of the greatest singles never to be played on daytime radio. (I first heard Tinseltown... on the radio years later, driving to the funeral of an old friend, it was the moment I needed, a sign that the day wasn't going to be as bad I expected and that the world was genuinely filled with good). In Easter Parade and Automobile Noise it had two of the most hushed pieces of wonderment you'd ever wish to hear. Fragile and glorious.

That was 83/84. And then there was nothing. Nothing for over half a decade. Which, in the eighties, in your twenties, was a lifetime.

1990 saw Hats. An album that couldn't possibly be as good as its predecessor. And for a while, wasn't. Until you realised it was just as incredible, just as unique.

We played this endlessly. This was the after work de-compress. This was the bottles of wine at tea on a Saturday night, back when we were so young and everything was in front of us and we knew nothing apart from the fact we had a life to grow into.

Hats is the sound of us growing into a life. And it will be ours forever. It's the sound of late summer nights on the decking here, watching the single bat that visits our street wheeling overhead. The last of the wine accompanied by sweaters and blankets as the late summer nights bleed into late autumn nights and there's no point going back in when we can just be out here, just talking, just being us, forever. It's in every moment we've ever had and I pray to god you have some sound that means this much to you, that can carry you through your life.

This album is us.

(The neon and the cigarettes, the rented rooms, the rented cars, the crowded streets, the empty bars, the chimney tops and trumpets, the golden lights, the loving prayers, the coloured shoes, the empty trains, I'm tired of crying on the stairs. The Downtown Lights.) I'll put that against any poetry you have. I'll take that beautiful desolation any day.



And there's an addendum. There's a tale of the album as artefact. This is the artefact.

This is a copy of Hats. A promotional copy, in a hat box. An obvious twist. From the days when record companies gave things away.

I've no idea how rare or how common this is. I don't care.

This is why I have it. This is what it means.

There was a rep for Virgin, the band's label at the time, who used to visit the Hull shop while I was manager there. A nice bloke. One day, I was called to the stockroom to take a call from his line manager. The call was, as I recall it now, to tell us that he was due at the shop and to ask that we tell him to contact his family. Obviously I asked him to.

It transpired that his mother, who was seriously ill, didn't have long left. His family, I think, had been trying to contact him. There were no mobile phones, the only way to get hold of people was to know their route. 

A few weeks later, when he returned to work, when he next called on us, he gave me this. He knew I was a fan, he gave me this and he thanked me. I'd done nothing. I'd passed on a simple message.

This box is something from somebody's life a long time ago. It's precious.

This, all this, the sheer joy and the heartbreak, is why music, great music, is so important.

Nothing else brings these moments, these memories.