So the world’s biggest superstar Taylor Swift has just released a mammoth break-up album, with the Morrisey-esque title, The Tortured Poets Society.  Her new record is “inspired” (if that is the right term) by two deep, heart-breaking and over-wrought love affairs with two of the finest of the male species - British men; an actor called Joe Alwyn, whom she was with for six years, and then Matty Healy, the lothario frontman of The 1975.

Despite it being only “on” for two months in April and May last year, the Healy fling seems to have made quite an impact on Swift.  I had known for some time that Healy was a massive The Blue Nile fan.  You just have to listen to Somebody Else by 1975 and and it’s unmistakably a Blue Nile song.  So it was no surprise that fans quickly connected the Healy break-up with a reference in her new song “Guilty as Sin?” where she sings about “fatal fantasies” for someone from her past who sends her the 1989 song “The Downtown Lights”…with 1989 notable as her year of birth and the name of her best album to date.

Now Swift moves merch and units like no one else on earth and I predict The Blue Nile will have a massive resurgence of interest after this and I would not be surprised if Swift now covers one of their songs, at least live - like she did memorable with Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes. It would belatedly drag The Blue Nile from being an obscure niche hifi lovers’ treasure into the music mainstream. I doubt though they will much care though. The Scottish tourist board once murdered their song Happiness with an injudicious edit, dropping the word Jesus, as the source of Paul Buchanan’s joy, and the Downtime Lights has already been covered by fellow Scots Rod Stewart and Annie Lennox.  The only decent cover of The Blue Nile remains Craig Armstrong’s orchestral arrangement of Let’s Go Out Tonight, with an even more doleful and emotionally exhausted vocal by Buchanan.

I fell in love with the Blue Nile after an introduction from a Glasgow friend Eric Bradley.  He pointed me towards A Walk Across the Rooftops in about 1992 and the rest just fell into place. Their records have signposted just about every special moment in my life since - all the highs and lows - and now as I write this, my 22-year old daughter is celebrating a birthday abroad, with Swift’s new record on repeat, inspired by the same.  The Blue Nile are famously un-prolific and sparing in their sharing of genius - producing just four albums, about 30 songs in total, over 35 years. I dug out the lyrics to Downtown Lights.  Wow, Buchanan can sing - his voice and intonation is sparse, throaty and whispery, but on The Downtown Lights he also wrote his most evocative lyrics.   Just try:

“The neon's and the cigarettes,
Rented rooms and rented cars,
The crowded streets, the empty bars,
Chimney tops and trumpets,
The golden lights, the loving prayers,
The coloured shoes, the empty trains,
I'm tired of crying on the stairs,
The downtown lights.”

And you can see how it might have struck a chord with Miss Swift.  If she could ever write a lyric like that then the world would be an even more amazing place than it already is. The fact that her new record’s genesis was borne out of receiving a song by a Glasgow band from the 1980’s - who still matter and move new audiences means a lot to those of us who have been there before.  

As a footnote, I saw The Blue Nile play once, in 1997 at The Albert Hall.  I managed to find a clip of that concert online.  Audio only, but you can absolutely tell in the performance that Buchanan was committed to every single syllable of what he was singing. 

A kind of commitment that clearly struck a chord with Miss Swift.