From Wikipedia:
A Walk Across the Rooftops is the debut album from Glaswegian adult contemporary/pop group The Blue Nile, released on 13 May 1984 on Linn Records in the UK and A&M Records in the US. Although the album was not a big hit on its initial release, it gained strong reviews from the music press and continued to gather praise when reissued in 2012. In 1989 British music magazine Record Mirror placed A Walk Across the Rooftops at #74 in its critics’ list of the best albums of the 1980s. The Irish singer Andrea Corr recorded “Tinseltown in the Rain” for her 2011 album of cover versions Lifelines and released it as the first single from that album. Duo Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin included a cover of “Heatwave” on their 1989 album The Big Idea.
Having put out their debut single “I Love This Life” in 1981, the Blue Nile spent the next couple of years playing gigs in their native Glasgow: with little money and due to singer Paul Buchanan’s limited ability on the guitar, by necessity their songs were stripped-down cover versions of old songs, and as Buchanan later said, “I suppose to some extent that started to bleed into our own songs – there was more and more space in what we were doing”. Buchanan and Robert Bell’s songs would start out written on an acoustic guitar or a piano, and then together with third member Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore and engineer Calum Malcolm the songs would be rearranged in the studio.
A persistent myth about the album’s origins is that the band were approached by Linn Products and commissioned to make a record that the company could use to demonstrate the quality of their high-specification hi-fi equipment—the company were so pleased with the result that they decided to form a record label specifically to release the resulting album. In fact Linn had already recently manufactured a cutting lathe to produce their own records, frustrated by the poor quality of the test LPs that were being provided for their flagship turntable product, the Linn Sondek LP12, and had already set up and released records on their ALOI (A Label Of Integrity) Records label before signing the Blue Nile. According to Paul Buchanan, the true story was that the band had already made demo recordings of some of their songs with engineer Calum Malcolm at his Castlesound Studios, which happened to be fitted out with Linn equipment as Malcolm had worked with the company in the past. Linn were visiting the studios and asked Malcolm to play a song recently recorded at the studio in order to test out their new speakers, and Malcolm duly obliged and chose the Blue Nile’s demo of “Tinseltown in the Rain”. On hearing the demo, Linn were impressed and felt the band’s sound fitted in with the type of music they wanted to release on their new label, and contacted the Blue Nile to offer a contract to make a full album: even so, it took the band a full nine months to respond to the company’s offer. Buchanan rejected the suggestion that Linn had asked the band to make a record in a particular style that would show off the company’s products in the best light, saying, “It was great because they left us to it. They trusted the engineer and they trusted us so they said, go off and make a record… We were—as you would imagine—you’re so fervent about what you’re doing that nothing would dissuade you from it and nothing would persuade you to do otherwise… we’d already demo’d some of the things before we’d even met Linn so… no, it was nothing to do with that.” PJ Moore also denied that Linn had deliberately chosen the band to produce a demo record for them, telling Uncut magazine that “it was a myth that we were a ‘hi-fi band signed to a hi-fi company’. We just got lucky that we’d found our way to an excellent engineer who knew the company.”
The album was recorded over five months in 1983 at Castlesound Studios, which Malcolm had set up in 1979 in the former primary school building in the village of Pencaitland, 12 miles (19 km) east of Edinburgh. Living first in a rented flat in Edinburgh, and then later sleeping on Malcolm’s floor when their money ran out, the band laboured over the album because all the sounds on the record had to be created and played physically, as it was made in the days before samplers existed. The band also had exacting standards and obsessed about every detail on the album: Malcolm recalled that “they were always particularly sensitive to not doing the wrong thing and making sure it had absolutely the right emotional impact: there were times when I’m sure everyone else felt something was done and then someone would throw a spanner in the works over some little thing”.
Blue Nile
A Walk Across The Rooftops
(Linn, 1984)
MediaFire DL Link
01. A Walk Across The Rooftops
02. Tinseltown In The Rain [MP3]
03. From Rags To Riches
04. Stay
05. Easter Parade
06. Heatwave
07. Automobile Noise
