MOLLUSCS ARE HEROES

The Blue Nile

one) You won’t like them. A Walk Across The Rooftops contains slap bass, trite lyrics on the debris of relationships, pans from (yawn) Coppola’s One From the Heart into (yawn) Paris, Texas, sung by Springsteen impersonating Sinatra. Hats has two white reggae tracks, gated snares, repeated use of the word ‘baby’ (yes), is ‘lush’, ‘cinematic’ and MOR. Annie Lennox and Rod Stewart have covered their songs. Phil Collins endorses them.


two) I don’t like American Music Club, John Cale, Talking Heads, Rickie Lee Jones or The Cars either.


three) Men in American books tend to wear hats.


four) Katy (my girlfriend) was in a philosophy class and, as the hush of young students began to stifle and choke, the teacher, by way of gesture, mentioned the best class he ever had occurred when Paul Buchanan, ‘you probably haven’t heard of him’, suggested they talk about love.


five) No-one has registered the scientific unproveability of ‘love’ in song more heart-rendingly than Paul Buchanan singing “how do I know you feel it?”, just moments from loss, or the frustrated ‘I can only tell you’ of “do I love you? YES I love you!”


six) What do you say when three years into a relationship the only thing holding you together is the fear of breaking the ties you’ve built in the outside world as a unit? When an offer of tea is the only lull in the silence? “Let’s go out tonight”, one last time, meet up with the ghost of your happiness, it can be the same again, you will dance, for one night, oh to bed the same different woman every night, and leave the relationship strafed with cigarette burns and headaches in, alone.


seven) Such compassionate pop. During Hats, the band’s lives were fragmenting and none of them felt they had any support around them, it would have been so easy to become insular and dismissive of others in such a situation.


eight) She was always beautiful. Her hair is scraped through with coral orange and grey. Scotland’s inability to say Carl teased a last laugh out from under her frown. Though the aftertaste of other men placed her lips.


nine) The closest modern pop equivalent aesthetically and emotionally, rather than musically say, is Daniel Bedingfield. I get the feeling that he’s an equally strident perfectionist, in thrall to nothing but his standards, which are steeped in values like integrity and honesty. Couple this with him writing songs that are scary & weird in their over-bearing emotional investment, sounding like pages of his diary set to music.


ten) You will like them. A Walk Across the Rooftops is a deeply emotional water, Buchanan a child lost in the weave of a Frank O’Hara poem. Hats refuses Don Paterson’s cycnicism of romance and insists on the transcendental of the ordinary and of the journey, the pressure difference.


!) I think romanticism suggests this sense of wilfully not having it all, leaving that one bit back, the whole, the mysterious ‘last’ that can never be reached, romanticism is the journey to try and attain that that you’re purposefully denying yourself. I have never listened to their third record, I most probably never will.