“Listen to this,” my friend, said, putting a cassette into my hands, “I think you’ll like it.”
The tape she’d handed me was a recording of The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops and the date wasn’t 1984, when the album had first been released, but 1987, when the album had begun to gather a particular head of cultural steam amongst my friendship group. Many of us read the NME and Melody Maker, and had taken note of the continuing acclaim which this unusual debut from a Glasgow band-who-really-didn’t-sound-like-other-Glasgow-bands was receiving from critics and musicians. By this point in the 1980s, cassettes were outselling vinyl records, and the humble C90 had transformed the way that teenagers like us were listening to the music that we loved. The C90 allowed us to quickly copy individual songs or whole albums and share them with each other in the form of mixtapes and personalised recordings, like the one I’d just received of A Walk Across the Rooftops. The newly-widespread availability of the walkman and other portable devices, meanwhile, had changed our favourite music into something that we could now experience in public spaces entirely privately, while the ordinary business of the day moved on around us.
In the mid 1980s, the C90 cassette was an ordinary, everyday object, yet it was also a powerfully numinous thing which allowed us to transmit and accrue cultural value within the shifting adolescent communities of which we were a part. Over the past few decades, an awful lot has changed in the ways in which we humans listen to, share, and value the music that we love, and I often find myself reflecting on what was different (if indeed, it was different) about the C90 and walkman culture of the 1980s. It interests me that what we might describe as a teenage public sphere (in the Habermasian sense of being built around the peer-to-peer sharing and discussion of cultural artefacts held-in-common) was predicated upon what was becoming an ever-more-intensely private act (that is, something that happened not just in private spaces, but increasingly inside one’s own head). Like most 1980s teenagers, me and my friends talked about and shared our music endlessly, but we most frequently listened to it alone, in the intimate spaces of our own rooms, and oftentimes in bed when we were supposed to be asleep. And the new portability of our music also meant that we now related to it as something that might shut out, or redefine, the world around us, in a very different way than it had done before. With a walkman and a pair of headphones our music had become something that felt, as a young 1980s teenager quite transformative, a personal soundtrack that could change the everyday public spaces through which we moved into magical, private, sonic landscapes.
The early teenage years are times of change for everyone, and I’m sure most of us, without much effort, might pinpoint the individual songs and albums we most powerfully associate with the baffling vacillation between child and adult, and could describe just how much that music meant to us at the time. And so The Blue Nile’s, A Walk Across the Rooftops is definitely, for me, the sound of being fourteen years old in Rochdale. When I think of it now, the first sounds that I hear are my walkman’s clicks and whirrs that say rewind and play, and then I clearly see the familiar streets through which I walked to and from my first job, clearing tables at the Midway Hotel. But quickly, the picture expands into another, completely imaginary, landscape: the wide-open sonic spaces which were conjured for me by the wistful voice of Paul Buchanan and the enigmatic music that became the soundtrack of my teenage dreaming.
What did I see when listening to A Walk Across the Rooftops? The album fades in from silence, as some barely-there scattered notes shatter with the crashing noise of breaking glass. A horn sounds, a latch opens “I walk across the rooftops,” Paul Buchanan sings, “I follow broken threads.” It is as if a somnambulist has smashed their bedroom window to sleepwalk through a familiar city that has now become their dreamscape. The weather feels like Glasgow, but all the vistas seem American. We see tall buildings, crowded streets, and the endless movement of “men and women / caught up in this big rhythm.” And through all the city’s noise and dislocation, the singer’s measured, melancholy voice remains a still point at the centre of its ever-whirling circle. Are the album’s “quiet redstones” found in Anniesland or Brooklyn? And will its “exit signs and subway trains” carry you away to Cowcaddens or to Coney Island?
When I was alone, and played A Walk Across the Rooftops through my walkman headphones, I found the album always held a curious ability to generate its own very particular space and feeling. And even more unusually, for something that was categorised as “pop” music, it didn’t do this by filling my ears with noise and repetition, but through lyric and sonic fragmentation, through a sensation of stillness, and sometimes even through near-silence. The album opened a door, and drew you, the listener, inside, to a place where you were prompted to open your eyes and try to see the world anew. In this world, a red car in the fountain suggested something like a miracle, and the rain in Tinseltown could feel like the snow in Van Morrison’s San Anselmo, a reminder that inside each ordinary place and everyday moment was a capacity for a kind of celestial wonder.
I found this album’s sonic alchemy, and its magic-realist urban spaces deeply, powerfully evocative, in much the same way, I had discovered, that modern American poetry made me feel. I had recently picked up a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind from my favourite bookstall on Bury market, and somehow this mysterious, slim volume and the Blue Nile’s strange, spare album chimed together for me at exactly the same adolescent moment. I found the same feeling in their black and white cover imagery, in their comparably seeking, reaching energy; in the deft word-play which seemed part and parcel of the urban places from which both emerged; in the urgency of the injunction I felt, when immersing myself in both book and album, to join them on a journey:
Let us arise and go now
into the interior dark night
of the soul’s still bowery
and find ourselves anew.
Even the fact that A Coney Island of the Mind had been published by San Francisco’s “City Lights” made it feel, for me, as if it and A Walk Across the Rooftops were arising out of exactly the same creative place. And like like the singer in the songs, like the poet in the poetry, I often found myself standing in all these busy, lonely places impatiently awaiting a rebirth of wonder.
So much of the music, art, or poetry we attach ourselves to during adolescence enables us to imagine new worlds for ourselves and envisage new futures in which our weird, isolated selves might somehow begin to fit. A Walk Across the Rooftops often feels like a lonely album, but it is a profoundly restless album too, and one of its many interesting features is that so little of it concerns love, in any sort of conventional sense. Whenever the album conjures a desired object, it appears to be the city as much as any lover, and I think that one of the reasons I so enjoyed this music as a teenager is because its perspectives seem much more varied and expansive than those of familiar songs about hooking up or moving on.
Rather than directly addressing a beloved, the album’s tracks are each voiced by different personae who tell stories or paint pictures that seem much larger than those of their private passions. From Rags to Riches, for example, depicts the migrant experience of leaving a home where “fences and tumble down bridges / surround and divide” for dislocating exile and stubborn hope. The song’s complex bricolage of sounds and words creates a series of vivid, drifting images, which eventually fade away into the sound of distant trains and receding footsteps which you feel may never reach their longed-for “waiting country.” Heatwave, meanwhile, is a shimmering haze of a song with multiple subject positions, an “I”, a “you” and a “we”. As a fourteen-year-old, this vertiginous piece of music suggested to me that I might somehow be all three of these things at once, making me feel very old and very young at the same time. And I’m still not sure I have the words to describe the effect of Easter Parade, which, more than a song, feels like a series of arrested sonic stills from the most beautiful black-and-white movie you can imagine, captured against a backdrop of perpetually chiming, sacred Sunday bells.
Listening to A Walk Across the Rooftops often feels like being an unwitting party to a series of private moments that are briefly glimpsed in public places, something which Paul Buchanan self-consciously understood as being central to the album’s distinctive mood. “One of the best things we saw, on our first trip to London” he said in a rare mid 1980s interview, “was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street, a couple of office workers, and they were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and you knew the feeling.” This tender, private moment on the corner of a busy city street, was, he said, exactly what he, PJ Moore, Robert Bell and their superb sound engineer, Calum Malcolm were trying to capture in A Walk Across the Rooftops. “You have to believe it’s worth trying to encapsulate a feeling like that, summoning it through the music you’re making. We’re willing to keep trying and trying and trying—just to capture that feeling.” And of what, precisely, was “that feeling,” composed? Of a mixture of “aspiration and compassion” Buchanan concluded, a kind of human empathy then, coupled with a kind of yearning. Part of the powerful spell that Buchanan and his bandmates managed to conjure in this album is that, despite its loneliness, their magic-realist city is never alienating, but remains a place of perpetual dreaming and imaginative potential. I am grateful to my 1980s friend, to the C90 cassette she recorded for me, and to the walkman that transmitted to my teenage ears the transformative sonic wonder of A Walk Across the Rooftops.
Kate Davies
After many repeat listens of my friend’s C90 recording, I eventually went out and bought my own copy of A Walk Across the Rooftops, which I still have on vinyl.
Further reading
Allan Brown, Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile (2010)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti A Coney Island of the Mind (1955)
Jurgen Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; 1989)
Blue Nile interview with Richard Cook in the New Musical Express, 12 May, 1984, accessed via Rock’s Back Pages.
The photographs of Glasgow nightscapes and reflections are by Tom. The snapshots of Manhattan and Coney Island were taken by me, in 1992.
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