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.