After a prolonged delay in which an entire album's worth of work was scrapped, the Blue Nile released Hats to rave reviews, including a rare five-star rating from Q magazine. It also became the band's most successful album, reaching number 12 on the UK album charts and spawning three singles: "The Downtown Lights", "Headlights on the Parade", and "Saturday Night".
Recording
Having finished promotion work for their debut album A Walk Across the Rooftops, the group's record company Linn Records were keen to have a follow-up record, and in early 1985 sent the band to a house in the golfing resort town of Gullane near the Castlesound Studios where the previous album had been produced. However, sessions for the new record hit problems almost immediately. The band did not yet have enough material to make another album, and with the group forced to share a house and having to spend all their time in close proximity with each other, arguments developed among the homesick band members. Exhausted and stressed, their problems were compounded when Virgin Records, to whom Linn had licensed the Blue Nile's records, began legal proceedings against Linn Records, demanding new material. "We were up against the wall," singer Paul Buchanan told Uncut magazine in 2013.[6] "Living away from home, no money, miserable, getting sued. We were absolutely zonked, the record company weren't pleased and everyone around was starting to think, this record is never going to get made. It was exhausting."[6]
After almost three years in the studio which produced virtually nothing, having begun and scrapped several songs, the group was forced to vacate Castlesound to make way for It's Immaterial, another Virgin band, to record their second album Song. Like the Blue Nile, It's Immaterial also ran into difficulties making their record, overrunning their allotted time and eventually spending a year at Castlesound. During this time, the Blue Nile had no option but to return home to Glasgow; back in familiar surroundings and freed from time constraints, Buchanan overcame his writer's block, while Robert Bell and Paul Joseph Moore began putting musical ideas down on a portastudio. As a result, when the band was finally able to return to Castlesound in 1988, the ideas for the album were already in place and according to Buchanan, "we knew exactly what we were doing. We actually recorded the rest of Hats super quick ... Honestly, half of Hats was, like, a week."[6]
In a 2012 interview with ClashMusic.com, Buchanan reflected on the time lost trying to make the album:
"We pretty much put the record [A Walk Across the Rooftops] out, promoted it and then the next thing we knew we were back in the studio. That whole gestation period had gone missing. We didn't really have the songs. We laboured away in the studio trying to generate the material there, which just didn't work. We recorded but we just didn't believe in what we'd recorded ... I think people perceived it as it was all to do with us sort of being in the studio for five years, but of course you couldn't be in the studio for five years, you'd lose your mind. There was a two year period where we would have gone back in but we couldn't get back in! So when we got back we actually finished Hats quickly. The period when we got bumped out the studio we had nothing else to do, so we packed up and went home. Which is what we should have done in the first place, because when we went back home we reverted to our old routines—practise, play and sit about each other's little flats and talk things through. We should have done that to begin with, really."[7]
Release
Hats was released in October 1989 simultaneously in both the United Kingdom and the United States: since the Blue Nile was essentially unknown in the US in 1989, the cover artwork for the US release of the album was slightly modified for marketing reasons, with the band's name in larger letters. As a promotional tool, A&M Records—who distributed Hats in North America—took out a full-page advertisement in Billboard magazine offering a free copy of the CD to anyone who called a toll-free number which was provided.[8]
In the US, Hats peaked at number 108 on the Billboard 200.[10] "The Downtown Lights" reached number 10 on the BillboardHot Modern Rock Tracks chart in early 1990, becoming the group's only single chart entry in that country.[10]
In November 2012 Virgin Records released two-CD "Collector's Edition" versions of Hats and its predecessor A Walk Across the Rooftops in the UK and Europe, each containing a remastered version of the original album plus a second CD of bonus tracks. The remastering process was overseen by original engineer Calum Malcolm, along with Paul Buchanan and Robert Bell, who chose the songs for the bonus CD.
On its initial release in 1989, Hats received highly positive reviews from music critics. Describing the album as "absolutely superb", David Cavanagh of Sounds found that Hats differed significantly from A Walk Across the Rooftops in both its recording technology and aspired moods.[19] Johnny Black of Q noted the more stripped-down nature of the album's songs and praised the band's new direction, stating that "if Hats has a flaw, it's only that it's too perfect, too considered."[16]NME's David Quantick felt that the album demonstrated the band's flair for writing "incredibly simple-sounding, emotional records about the stuff that fascinates them."[14]Simon Reynolds, writing in Melody Maker, stated that "only the laziest ear would confuse this crystalline perfection with the hygiene and polish of plastic pop" and described the album as "big music, that leaves you feeling very small, very still and very close to tears."[21] In a more lukewarm assessment, David Thigpen of Rolling Stone complimented the band's use of instrumentation to convey emotions, but felt that Paul Buchanan's singing range was limited and the album occasionally veers "into sticky melancholy."[18]
In a retrospective review of Hats, Jason Ankeny of AllMusic praised the album as "a triumph of personal vision over the cold, remote calculations of technology" and stated that in spite of general lack of live instrumentation, "it is nevertheless an immensely warm and human album."[11] Following the release of the album's 2012 remastered version, D. M. Edwards of PopMatters wrote that Hats sounded "richer, fuller, more layered and produced" than A Walk Across the Rooftops and provided a "pretty unrelenting opportunity to really wallow in gorgeous, sublime, melancholy."[8] Reviewing the remastered versions of both albums in Mojo, James McNair cited them as "superior, elegant examples of masterful craftmanship", noting elements of soul and classical minimalism in the albums' "electro-acoustic mood pieces", and described them as "exquisite music for the small hours in which little is said but much is revealed".[13]
Accolades
Hats featured strongly on the end of year critics' lists, making number eight on Melody Maker's albums of the year list,[22] and number 18 on NME's list.[23] "The Downtown Lights" was also placed at number 15 on Melody Maker's singles of the year list.[24]
Hats was voted number 345 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000).[25]Q placed Hats at number 92 on its list of the "100 Greatest British Albums Ever" in 2000 and at number 38 on its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s" in 2006.[26][27]
Legacy
Rickie Lee Jones, a fan of the band, personally selected the Blue Nile as her opening act for her US tour in 1990. She later recorded a duet with them, a cover of their own "Easter Parade" from A Walk Across the Rooftops, which was featured as a B-side to the single "Headlights on the Parade". "The Downtown Lights" was covered by two artists in 1995: by Annie Lennox (with whom The Blue Nile worked on her debut album Diva) on her second solo recording Medusa and by Rod Stewart on his album A Spanner in the Works. In 2018, Pure Bathing Culture released a cover of the entire album, as part of Turntable Kitchen's Sounds Delicious series of artists covering their favourite albums in full.[28]
In 2016, the 1975's lead singer Matty Healy stated that Hats was his favorite album of the 1980s.[29] Healy cited Hats as an influence on the band's 2018 single "Love It If We Made It".[30] In 2024, in the opening and closing lyrics to her song "Guilty as Sin" from the album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift included a reference to a person sending her "The Downtown Lights" to listen to. Swift had previously had a relationship with Healy.[31]
^Pitchfork Staff (10 September 2018). "The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s". Pitchfork. Retrieved 24 April 2023. The results aren't far off from the romantic synth-pop that ascended the charts in the '80s...
