The blue nile....

Music of the Day
Kurt Rosenwinkl – Heartcore
Various – Now That’s What I Call Music May-Sept 1973
The Blue Nile – A Walk Across The Rooftops
The Blue Nile – Hats
The Blue Nile – Tinseltown in the Rain (Best of)
Grand Funk Railroad – Live, The 1971 Tour

Today we’re off to see The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan in concert. He’s not toured for ten years – last time we saw him was in September 1996....

We leave for Glasgow around 2:30 having burned a “best of” Blue Nile CD for the journey and park up at Byres Road around an hour later...

At Lost in Music I buy Grand Funk Railroad’s “Live, The 1971 Tour” for a fiver - much to Anne’s wonderment for, for some, even to me, inexplicable reason, I am a big Grand Funk fan.

Anne thinks they're rubbish – until I reel off some tracks she likes, whereupon she says, “I didn’t know that was Grand Funk...”



This is the fourth live set I have by the band....

FOPP yields nothing and we head to Little Italy for a lovely coffee...



You may recall I spent a few hours recently “flying around the planet” on Google Maps after stumbling across the site whilst searching for the location of Mr Singh’s West End Balti. Of course with all the shenanigans of visiting San Francisco and Central Europe, I neglected to actually write down the address...

And so we found ourselves looking for a venue for dinner, the location of which I had only a vague idea...

Instead we found Mr India’s West End Balti and Dosa House (which I’ve since checked – turns out this was the restaurant I found in my search for Mr Singh’s and I never realised I’d got the name wrong). A recommendation in an old newspaper article in the window by Scotland’s most intelligent football writer, Graham Spiers, clinched the deal and we went in...



The food was excellent, including monster starter portions of veggie pakora and lamb tikka and succulent main dishes of Chicken Tikka Bhuna for Anne and Vegetable Balti for me...

Tasty! (and recommended - see here for The List’s take on it) http://www.list.co.uk/restaurants/glasgow/indian/index.php?q=u,v1013,o3

We will be back...

Whilst at the restaurant I texted old friend Alan Brodie to advise we were in Glasgow for Paul Buchanan – it was Brodie who first introduced me to the Blue Nile back in 1984, through their first album, “A Walk Across the Rooftops”...

A call comes back but it’s not Alan, it’s Mr James Jamieson phoning to see if I’m attending the launch of the Out of the Bedroom IV CD tonight. He’d forgotten I had a prior engagement. I await his report back re how the evening went...

We decided to leave the car at Byres Road and take the Underground into the City Centre for the gig...

A long wait and we’re finally admitted to the hall at 8pm. Support is a young singer-songwriter Hayley Hutchinson (http://www.hayleyhutchinson.net/) – she has a clear crisp voice, a good guitar style and some countrified songs from her debut CD which her mum is selling in the foyer. She gets a good reception from the crowd...

Turns out she’s the daughter of original Spider from Mars, John Hutchinson and Mr Bowie is apparently a fan...

At nine, Paul Buchanan ambles on with his band, which includes Robert Bell on bass and keyboards. To all intents and purposes then, this is The Blue Nile. They have all the samples used on the original records and the arrangements mirror perfectly those on the band’s classic four album canon...

As it was ten years ago, there is much banter tonight between stage and audience, much to everyone’s hilarity and Mr B makes some jokes about the laboured “how come you take so long between albums” point which is invariably asked of him in interviews...

The concert is superb. Movement on the stage is minimal, almost non existent, but the music speaks for itself and the home town audience (the first of three over this weekend) is here to worship at the altar of the Nile...

Me too...

The set list includes songs from all four albums plus two new songs (in the same Blue Nile style) and, to close the night, a rendition of Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night”...



And then it’s out into the night, the Subway back to Byres Road, into the car and an hour’s drive home...

Lovely...

Highlight of the Day : The Blue Nile in all but name, live in concert