The Jewels Of The Nile

peace at Last is The Blue Nile s third, and eagerly awaited album, a winsome collection of songs from the ineffably discriminating Paul Buchanan & Co. We ve had to wait seven long years for it, and mercifully, all the chewed fingernails weren t in vain.
Offspring number three is as poised and pitch-perfect as its pristine predecessors, 1984 s A Walk Across The Rooftops and 1989 s Hats with the added confidence and panache that comes with lapping up industrial amounts of critical acclaim along the way.
Paul Buchanan, not a man given to wittering on aimlessly when he d be better occupied behind a guitar, is a tad more comfortable than before in trumpeting the praises of his progeny.
One of my friends says that when he s 70, he ll look back and say: I was really mixed up at 69 but see how I ve got it together now , he avers. And I feel a bit like that about this album. I would be lying if I said that I thought our progress was over with this album, but I felt much freer this time around than before.
Peace At Last first saw the light of day in Dublin, only to finally find its feet in the headier environs of Paris and LA. What tempted a trio of Glaswegians to debunk westwards when home studios had served them so ably in the past?
Actually, it s a fairly Dublinesque story, Buchanan says, displaying his gift for hitting the bullseye. One of the guys went over for a house-warming party and in our experience, once you get to Dublin, leaving it is an entirely different matter and he called me up and said I think I ve found a place to work. We must all come here which we duly did! Dublin s got such a reputation for being a sociable town that it seemed only right that we ended up there.
Buchanan s abandonment to music is refreshingly simple, in times when most musicians favour epiphanies of messianic proportions.
When I was finishing university, by chance I heard two pieces of music that had a huge influence on me, and more or less decided that music was for me. The slow movement from Mahler s Fifth Symphony was one, and Marvin Gaye s What s Goin On was the other. They made such a strong impression on me. After that, I really didn t even question whether I should abandon literature. The decision was made.
Buchanan s renowned for his Zen-like approach to his music. He s been known to liken success to a drop of water from a cactus a source of nourishment that allows them to go on and do one more thing ergo, his indifference to the pressures of the market place to churn out product on an annual or biennial basis.
I don t want to clutter the world up with useless CDs, he declares. Maybe if The Blue Nile makes five records, that will be enough. I d like to think that when people listen to our records they d be able to identify with some of the songs, and recognise that the emotions aren t cheap. Maybe they ll remember a song from the day they got married, or the day that somebody died. If they can do that, then I m happy with that. n

The Blue Nile play the Olympia Theatre on Tuesday 1st July