A Walk Across the Rooftops
| A Walk Across the Rooftops | ||||
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| Studio album by The Blue Nile | ||||
| Released | 30 April 1984 | |||
| Recorded | 1981–1983 | |||
| Studio | Castlesound Studios, Pencaitland, East Lothian, Scotland | |||
| Genre | Sophisti-pop | |||
| Length | 37:47 | |||
| Label | Linn, A&M | |||
| Producer | Paul Buchanan and Robert Bell | |||
| The Blue Nile chronology | ||||
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| Singles from A Walk Across the Rooftops | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| The Great Rock Discography | 8/10 |
| Mojo | |
| PopMatters |   |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Sounds | |
| Uncut | 10/10 |
A Walk Across the Rooftops is the debut album by Scottish band The Blue Nile, released on 30 April 1984 on Linn Records in the UK and on A&M Records in the US. Although the album was released to little fanfare and was not a big hit on its initial release, it slowly accumulated fans and sales through word of mouth as the years passed, and by the time the follow-up Hats was released in 1989, A Walk Across the Rooftops had sold 80,000 copies. It continued to gather praise when reissued in 2012.
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 recalled that Linn had given the band £10,000–£20,000 to make the record, but rejected the suggestion that the company 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."
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