a b "The Blue Nile | Awards". AllMusic. Archived from the original on 22 March 2015 . Retrieved 4 July 2013.

a b Edwards, D. M. (31 January 2013). "The Blue Nile: A Walk Across the Rooftops / Hats". PopMatters . Retrieved 10 March 2013. More importantly, as has been reaffirmed on this year’s stripped-down solo psalm Mid Air, Paul Buchanan’s enraptured voice and words capture the essence of hearts breaking and healing as well as anyone outside Tamla Motown’s heyday. Tavakoli, Mina (20 November 2020). "Almost anarchy: The Style Council and the smooth sounds of sophisti-pop". The Washington Post . Retrieved 21 April 2021.Heim, Chris (15 March 1990). "Blue Nile: Hats (A & M)". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved 24 October 2015.

In a 2012 interview with ClashMusic.com, Buchanan reflected on the time lost trying to make the album: People tend to flag up The Blue Nile’s Scottishness, as if geography and accidents of birth were responsible for artistic vision; but surely, again like Hopper, the dreams and tears here are universal. The city streets, cars, rooftops, rain, couples and love documented and expressed so delicately throughout the seven songs are potentially everywhere, any time, “caught up in this big rhythm”. This is why the band stood out then and hover above now; both everymen and angels. a b Roberts, David, ed. (2006). Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p.66. ISBN 978-1-904994-10-7. Holden, Stephen (30 July 1990). "Review/Pop; The Blue Nile's Mystical, Majestic Ballads". The New York Times. New York . Retrieved 7 February 2023. Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.”

Release

The story about Hats, and the Blue Nile in general, is uncustomary, though it began normally enough: While attending the University Of Glasgow, Paul Buchanan, PJ Moore, and Robert Bell tried to start a couple different bands, none of which took. Eventually, they became the Blue Nile and, this being the punk era, set about trying to make music with the rudimentary gear and means they had at their disposal. In a roundabout way — through their engineer Calum Malcolm — they caught the ear of a hi-fi audio equipment company called Linn Products, which was in the process of starting a record label. Their debut, 1984’s A Walk Across The Rooftops, was the first release on Linn Records. Still a landmark, still high, still somehow intangible: The Blue Nile didn’t sound or function like any normal band. For anyone looking to build their career and see the world moving forward at a frantic pace, they are instructed to live in the city, but few remember to tell of how mentally foreboding the prospect can be. Though the extreme condensity is thrilling from a newcomer’s perspective, everyone eventually feels that overwhelming entrapment, simultaneously compressed and left alone. Glaswegian band The Blue Nile, and particularly frontman and musical director Paul Buchanan, are deeply entrenched with this experience. Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis. The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone. Part of the reason Hats has drawn so many people in, part of why it still feels so enigmatic, is that it exists in liminal spaces. It is between swells of love and relationships crumbling, it is between the weathered final strains of one night and the fresh start of another. It is between genres, it is between eras. It is between the realities of our surroundings and the dreams we project onto them. If you have spent any time traversing a city at night while listening to Hats, you know it’s the sound of being out amongst all of this apparent opportunity, but still feeling isolated and listless within all of it. It’s the sound of living some years, and wandering familiar streets as if they’ll finally provide an unexpected answer. In the face of all this theoretical newness, you instead can’t shake the feeling of loss, the feeling that there should’ve been something more, the feeling of time having passed, the feeling that you will never stop searching for something you can’t actually hold.

Hats featured strongly on the end of year critics' lists, making number eight on Melody Maker 's albums of the year list, [21] and number 18 on NME 's list. [22] "The Downtown Lights" was also placed at number 15 on Melody Maker 's singles of the year list. [23] In more recent years, their name seems to keep reappearing — maybe not more frequently, exactly, but perhaps a new generation is finding them. Or, as impossible as it seems for anyone to sound like the Blue Nile, maybe their influence is more significant this time around. Artists with as much history as Destroyer and as freshly exciting as Westerman have been compared to them. The 1975’s Matty Healy has talked about listening to Hats constantly while crafting last year’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships; this year, Natasha Khan, an artist obviously well-versed in the ’80s, mentioned discovering them for the first time while working on the new Bat For Lashes album Lost Girls. Pure Bathing Culture covered the entirety of Hats last year; they were joined by Ben Gibbard on a couple songs. A couple months later, fellow Scots Chvrches offered their own rendition of “The Downtown Lights.” And Buchanan still reemerges as a co-writer from time to time, most recently on Jessie Ware’s Glasshouse in 2017. s A Walk Across the Rooftops remains unique in its fusion of chilly technology and a pitch of confessional, romantic soul that ‘alternative’ types would usually shy away from for fear it wasn’t ‘cool’. It was always (at least) two things at once: in the years since, its peerless power to affect has accrued multiple layers of rueful resonance.Sodomsky, Sam (27 November 2018). "The 1975's Matty Healy Dissects Every Song on A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships". Pitchfork. Archived from the original on 11 January 2021 . Retrieved 23 February 2021.