Next year sees the 30th anniversary of The Blue Nile's first work together. Four albums - containing a total of just 33 songs - have followed since. Yet scarcity has served only to intensify love for the band's intensely romantic songs.

The Blue Nile are one of modern music's greatest mysteries, as secretive about their plans and status as they are about their painstaking methods. For the first time Allan Brown, a fan from the time of the band's first album in 1983 and friend of the band's composer Paul Buchanan, gets behind the veil to analyse the band's appeal through personal memoir, critical study, access to unreleased recordings and encounters with those who have been central to the strange romantic, melancholy course of The Blue Nile.