A Walk Across the Rooftops

Glaswegian adult contemporary group The Blue Nile's debut album owes much to Scottish audio equipment company Linn Hi-Fi. Three years previously, The Blue Nile had recorded and independently released their first single, "I Love This Life," which charted at #126 before vanishing. Not long afterwards, their record company, RSO Records, was absorbed into Polygram, meaning the band had to finance themselves. The Blue Nile continued to record on a shoestring without success until Linn Hi-Fi came across a demo of "Tinseltown In The Rain." They surmised that the group's spacious, all-analogue recordings would showcase the quality of their new equipment. For some reason, after their initial approach, The Blue Nile trio didn't get back to them for nine months. "Eventually the three of us squeezed into a phone box to ring them," frontman Paul Buchanan recalled to Mojo magazine. Linn gave them somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 to record A Walk Across The Rooftops and also gave them complete creative control.

Speaking about the title track and the album to Mojo magazine January 2013, Buchanan said: "The title track was just me looking out of a tenement window and dreaming, as I still seem to be doing. It seems a bit creaky to say now, but I remember telling people the album was a kind of imagined documentary set in Glasgow - headlights reflected in a puddle, that kind of things."