Tinseltown in the Rain

The demo for this tribute to The Blue Nile's home city of Glasgow was recorded on a shoestring as the band were without a record company and struggling to finance their recordings. However, when their engineer and honorary fourth member Calum Malcolm played the tune to the Scottish audio equipment company Linn Hi-Fi, they surmised that the group's spacious, all-analogue recordings would be perfect for showcasing the quality of their new equipment. Linn signed the band to their associated label, Linn Records, and gave them approximately £15,000 to record their debut album, with no stipulation about how the record should sound. It took about year, but the group emerged with A Walk Across The Rooftops, which was one of the most acclaimed albums of 1984 in the UK. The group was little heard in America though, as Linn didn't have any reach in that country.

The Blue Nile weren't a typical '80s synth band: their songs were rather cerebral, they didn't make music videos, and they were startled by the media attention they earned from their debut album, A Walk Across The Rooftops. With the right promotion and some promotional muscle behind it, "Tinseltown In The Rain" could have caught on in America, but their audience there was mostly record store clerks who got their imports and tried to explain to their friends how great this band was. On their home turf they earned plaudits from the cynical British music press but never pushed for more commercial success. Their next album, Hats, didn't appear until 1989.

Corrs lead singer Andrea Corr covered this for her 2011 record of cover versions Lifelines, and released it as the first single from that album.