Achi news desk-
The track ‘Guilty Like Sin?’ opens with a reference to the Glasgow group: “Drowning in the Blue Nile / ‘Downtown Lights’ sent me / I hadn’t heard it in a while”.
The song mentioned was included on the Scottish trio’s second album hats, and its inclusion by Swift is believed to be a reference to Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975.
The singer has named Hats as his favorite album from the 1980s and cited as an influence for the band’s track ‘Love It If We Made It’.
He told Pitchfork: “It definitely started as us just killing Hats every night before we went on stage, listening to that record until it broke. It’s a little different; it’s like Blue Nile on steroids.”
Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile was alerted to the name check by a fan on Instagram, responding with a simple “thank you”.
The Glasgow group can expect a boost in interest in their back catalogue, with a massive increase in Google searches for The Blue Nile since the release of Swift’s album.
In January the singer was photographed wearing a dress designed by Perth store Little Lies, with the store hitting their monthly sales target in a day and almost immediately selling out of the item in question.
Some social media users have even joked that Glasgow’s West End could see an increase in tourism thanks to interested Swifties.
While that might sound a little unlikely, earlier this year a company started offering walking tours of London locations checked out by the singer in her 2019 song A London boy as well as the kebab shop where the music video for the 2017 single ‘End Game’ was filmed.
Likewise Cornelia Street in New York has become a place of pilgrimage for Swift’s devout fans after her song on the 2019 album Loveras well as places like The Bluebird Cafe and Centennial Park in her native Nashville.
Read more:
The singer will visit Scotland later this year on her ongoing Eras Tour, playing three nights at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium.
Swift has only performed in the country once before, selling out the Hydro in Glasgow on the back of her album 1989.
On stage she referred to her family’s Scottish roots, telling the crowd that her father had sent her an email: “In the subject line it said ‘tell this to Scotland’, and in the email it said ‘our family all coming from Scotland and you. you have to tell them that’.”
Her great-great-grandfather was George Finlay who, according to his son’s marriage record, was found somewhere in Scotland around 1850.
That son, Lancelot George Finlay, was born in Southampton but later moved to America where he married Eleanor Mayer on 27 November 1917 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Their son Robert Bruce married Marjorie Moehlenkamp, ​​Swift’s maternal grandmother for whom he wrote a song, ‘Marjorie’, on her 2020 album Folklore.
On her father’s side, it appears the 34-year-old can trace her roots back to King William the Lion of Scotland, while Douglas – a Scottish name – also appears in her family tree.
