Hats

I've always loved hats – from cowboy hats as a gun-toting kid to the trilby and Panama as a misguided youth to latterly the pork variety (Bebop rather than wide-boy Londoner style) – but it took me a while to discover the album by the Blue Nile.

It was the friend of a friend in Sheffield who recommended it initially. I hadn't even heard of the Blue Nile, which probably wasn't surprising given their track record of roughly an album every six or so years, and Hats is only the second of a desultory output. We were in the HMV shop at the time, perusing sale items and I thanked him but figured I'd pass it over this time, as I had a mortgage to pay and quite enough already in my greedy hands.

Not long after, though, I heard the Blue Nile's first album, A Walk Across The Rooftops (from which the glorious single, 'Tinseltown in the Rain' was taken) and realised that Dave had clearly known his onions. A first listening to Hats immediately revealed it as one of the most atmospherically beautiful pop records I'd ever heard – certainly by any Scottish group that I knew about. Only seven short-ish songs, but each one tinged with the most delicious, lingering sense of melancholia. Even the song titles suggest the idea of romantic yearning: 'Over the Hillside', 'The Downtown Lights', 'Headlights on the Parade', 'From a Late Night Train', 'Seven A.M.', all redolent of the dreamer's indefinable yearning for something beyond the quotidian.

'On a midnight train/Reflected in the water...' The dreamer in question is Paul Buchanan, the song-writing hub of a trio that met at Glasgow University. He was one of the special guests interpreting a couple of Bowie songs at the recent David Bowie prom, and there must have been many in the audience who asked themselves, Paul who? To those in the music industry, though, he has long been recognised not only for his songs, but also for his distinctive soulful voice. Once, I believe, he was even dubbed Glasgow's Marvin Gaye.

Minimalism is the key note to his songs. 'From a Late Night Train', for example, employs the band's trademark lush chords, ambient synthesiser wash and a lone trumpet to create a pervasive sense of private loneliness. In fact, the dominant instrumentation of strings and synthesiser in combination is one which normally doesn't appeal to me at all, but Buchanan, Robert Bell and P.J. Moore do it with an irresistible good taste.

Just in case of being branded a 'synthesiser group' – and therefore lumped, I suppose, with the likes of Human League and Depeche Mode – Hats was followed by Peace At Last, another beautiful album but this time characterised by Buchanan's acoustic guitar. By now, they were based in the U.S. and had worked with the likes of Rickie Lee Jones and Annie Lennox, who recorded a version of 'The Downtown Lights'.

Their final album, High, took the longest period yet to write and record, and Buchanan's perfectionism seemed to take its toll. In keeping with a band that shied away from the public eye – pop music's equivalent in some ways of J.D. Salinger – there was never any official announcement, but there seems little doubt that the 2004 release was their swansong. Indeed, in the years since, there has been an unofficial biography (which probably sold in hundreds rather than thousands), a truly minimalist Buchanan solo album and a series of collector's editions of their first three albums, which smacks of the Virgin label clutching at commercial straws.

I was lucky enough to pick up a double-CD version of Hats in a sale in Brive to supplement my original purchase, consisting of one re-mastered CD of the original and another CD of thematic odds and ends, including a live version of 'Headlights on the Parade', which suggests that the band could cut the mustard on stage as well as in the studio. In fact, typical of their perverse approach to any kind of positive publicity, they made an appearance at Glastonbury in 1997 before disappearing from view until the release of High.

Their first and last are both good, but perhaps a tad disappointing in terms of the standards achieved on their second and third albums. I shall keep rifling through sales bins in search of a special edition of Peace At Last, but for now I am delighted to have an expanded version of Hats to listen to whenever I feel the ache of melancholia demanding musical sustenance.

A Salty Dog

It was at an agricultural camp in the Fenlands where I discovered that it was OK to like Procol Harum. Although I'd revered them in 1967, I'd subsequently turned my back on the group from Essex because they'd had the temerity to release 7" singles. One of them had gone to No.1. And stayed there for several weeks. In the summer of 1973, I was n-n-nearly n-n-n-nineteen, after all, and as a mature album freak, I spurned commercial singles.

But one evening, one of those limpid summer evenings when you could look right across the flat lands of East Anglia and catch sight of Ely cathedral shimmering on the distant horizon, my friends and I from school, who'd come to pick strawberries, gathered around a bearded longhair who liked to pontificate at the end of the working day. Like Socrates, he would talk about diverse things to anyone who cared to listen. That particular evening, he sang the praises of Procol Harum. Ah, so it was all right then, after all.

Later that summer, back in Bath at my grandparents' house where we'd decamped en famille after Belfast, I treated myself to a cheap Procol Harum compilation on the Music for Pleasure label. The longhaired sage was not wrong. The music was good. Very good. Soon after, I graduated to their full first four albums, twinned as 'doublebacks' by the Fly label. The lovely poppy first album of 1967 came with A Salty Dog from 1969, while the second, Shine On Brightly, was conjoined with their fourth, Home.

It's hard to pick a personal favourite. The first album is full of quirky songs like 'Conquistador' and 'A Christmas Camel' and I've always had a very soft spot for the harder, darker edge of Home. Shine On Brightly came close, but the long suite on the second side was a bit too ambitious and not entirely successful as a consequence. The later Exotic Birds And Fruit had some fabulous melodic moments, like 'The Idol' and 'Strong As Samson' (without a 'p'). A Salty Dog tends to garner the critics' votes – and, generally speaking, I'd say they're right.

It's a very diverse album in which everything works, as if they'd learnt from the mistakes of the 'In Held Twas In I' suite on the second album and come out fighting. The songs are nearly all memorable and range from epic to ditty via blues-rock and the kind of soulful pop in which the band excelled.

It was not an ordinary band. Lyricist Keith Reid (like Pete Sinfield of King Crimson) was a kind of silent (sixth) member, who could concentrate on dreaming up vivid if somewhat opaque words set mainly to the music of the band's twin keyboard-playing vocalists, Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher. With quite different styles, they kept themselves mainly to themselves. Rarely the twain would meet except in the playful Fisher-Brooker-Reid's 'Boredom' (here) and in the suite that didn't quite work.

While Brooker and Reid contributed all but one number on the first album, here they contribute only twice as many as both Fisher and Reid and, for the first time, guitarist Robin Trower and Reid. The latter's 'Juicy John Pink' and 'Crucifiction Lane' (one of Reid's characteristic plays-on-words) are almost Cream-like. I've always rated Trower as a really fine guitarist and was not disappointed when I saw him in the context of a post-Procol power trio at a Reading Festival. It was heavy music, but heavier on atmosphere and resonant, ruminative chords than it was on metal. So it would come as little surprise to discover his 1997 album, Someday Blues, which reveals Trower arguably as the equal of Eric Clapton and Peter Green when it came to interpreting da blooz.

It's an odd quirk of this album that Brooker and Fisher both composed a kind of singalonga Coleridge maritime epic in 'A Salty Dog' and 'Wreck of the Hesperus' respectively, each one (tastefully) arranged by its author. Keith Reid must have been reading a history of Britain's navy or some such tome at the time.

Their different vocal styles are almost like the two sides of John Cale. Brooker's 'The Milk of Human Kindness' and 'The Devil Came from Kansas' on Side 1 here prefigure the darker tone of Home. Matthew Fisher, however, whose first solo album, Journey's End, could almost have been written and sung by the more melodic and whimsical John Cale of Paris 1919, brings things to an airy conclusion with 'Pilgrim's Progress': a lovely light confection featuring the soaring ecclesiastical organ sound he lent to 'A Whiter Shade of Pale'.

And therein, of course, lies a tale. Fans of popular music's litigious folklore will remember that it all ended in tears. In Journey's End, Fisher sung cryptically and sardonically on 'Going For a Song', 'You can put piranha in my swimming pool... but please don't make me sing that song again'. Many years later, after a second spell in the band, he would air his grievances in court. After much appealing, the House of Lords ruled that he was entitled to a (40%) credit for 'Whiter Shade' – though without the retrospective royalties he sought.

However... that was now and this was then, or some such variation. His arch rival, Gary Brooker, now has a holiday home in this part of France. A friend of mine decorated it for him and promised to introduce me to the great man. The nearest I got was a concert in Cahors by Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings, when our Mr. Brooker turned up as a special guest star – to play, among other things, a memorable duet on that song with Georgie Fame.

Things were certainly not sweetness and light back in 1969 and Fisher would quit after A Salty Dog, to be followed by Trower after the band's fifth, Broken Barricades. The guitarist would build a solo career for himself that was rather more successful than Matthew Fisher's, ironically aided by his former band mate's production on the gold-rated Bridge of Sighs.

But the Essex boys and the interloping organist from Surrey did manage to hold it all together long enough to produce an album that, if not quite a bona fide masterpiece, was certainly one of the best to grace the initial golden age of British pop-rock.