Paul Buchanan interview

I'm not sure I mentioned this, but I interviewed Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile just before Christmas. He's a fantastic interview, funny and self-deprecating and honest and his latest album Mid Air (his first solo record after more than 30 years in the music business) is excellent too.

I thought it came out rather well.


At the Source of the Blue Nile: An Interview with Paul Buchanan

By Jennifer Kelly 31 January 2013


“Being in a band is a very particular life. You’re sort of family to each other,” says Paul Buchanan, who from 1981 until fairly recently, headed up the synth-heavy, proto-new wave Scottish band the Blue Nile. The band formed as Buchanan and his friends Robert Bell and PJ Moore finished university, and lasted through more than three decades and four widely spaced albums. Though never wildly successful commercially, the band had an outsized impact. The super clean sound of the Blue Nile’s debut Walk Across the Rooftops is said to have inspired Phil Collins. The second album, Hats, set a standard for impressionistic, cinematic pop.


But when, at the end of the 2000s, it came to an end—about the same time that a close friend passed away—Buchanan says he found himself at a bit of a loss. “When it becomes obvious that things are stuttering, it makes you just stop and think about all those years of saying ‘Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow,’” he says, a palpable wistfulness permeating his thick Scottish vowels.

More