Family Life by The Blue Nile

Everything about The Blue Nile tales a bit of time.
In the early 1980s I worked in an office in Glasgow city centre and a work mate gave me a taped copy of the band's first album, A Walk Across the Rooftops.  It was strange and wonderful; slabs of electronic sounds, graced with heart-rending vocals, accurately describing my city in both abstract and real emotional terms that I hadn't considered ; a new novel combination of elements that touched me, resonated inside, made me look at the city in a new, refreshing light.  The Blue Nile are a Glasgow band and I took them into my heart.  They are Paul Buchanan, Robert Bell, and Paul Joseph Moore.

I remember going to see them in their first tour, at the Royal Concert Hall and I don't know who was more nervous, the band or the audience.  But when they started to play there was a shared feeliing of joy and relief - they could play, he could sing, it really was that good!

Family Life from the Peace at Last album.  It is the band's third album, released in 1996, a mere thirteen years from the first one, seven years after Hats.  Peace at Last, to me, turns the Blue Nile soundscape upside down, featuring realistic, natural sounds rather than their signature synths.  The step back to tradition makes a leap forward possible.  It sounds simpler, more conventional, more powerful.

Family Life is anchored by piano, acting as both chordal backing and melodic lead, with strings and a solo trumpet adding colour and mood.  Paul Buchanan's vocal is melancholic, sad, pathetic and strident all at the same time.  This is stately music, it describes a human condition.   It is delicate, fragile, precise.  It is praise, a prayer, a plea for forgiveness.  It progresses so slowly; sometimes it seems to freeze, to stop.  It can't get slower... then it does.

To me the song is about isolation, loneliness, love, loss.
It is Christmas Eve; snow is falling; a man watches the city skyline. He is alone.  His family is elsewhere, his wife is with another husband, his children with a new father.
It starts with a piano chord and then:
Starlight, do you know me?
Please, don't look at me now
I'm falling apart
Silver on the window
Like the bike I once had
At home in the yard
Jesus, love let me down
And I know where You are

Tears form when I hear:
Tomorrow will be Christmas
We'll be singing old songs
And light up the tree
God and all the mercy
And say all your prayers
For little old me

After the musical climax, we arrive at the intimate and ultimate conclusion:
Jesus, I go to sleep and I pray
For my kids, for my wife, family life.

The final notes in the piano promise hope and happiness.  Maybe