out their new speakers, and Malcolm duly obliged and chose the Blue Nile's demo of "Tinseltown in the Rain". On hearing the demo, Linn were impressed and felt the band's sound fitted in with the type of music they wanted to release on their new label, and contacted the Blue Nile to offer a contract to make a full album: even so, it took the band a full nine months to respond to the company's offer. Buchanan recalled that Linn had given the band £10,000–£20,000 to make the record, but rejected the suggestion that the company had asked the band to make a record in a particular style that would show off the company's products in the best light, saying, "It was great because they left us to it. They trusted the engineer and they trusted us so they said, go off and make a record ... We were—as you would imagine—you're so fervent about what you're doing that nothing would dissuade you from it and nothing would persuade you to do otherwise ... we'd already demo'd some of the things before we'd even met Linn so ... no, it was nothing to do with that." PJ Moore also denied that Linn had deliberately chosen the band to produce a demo record for them, telling Uncut magazine that "it was a myth that we were a 'hi-fi band signed to a hi-fi company'. We just got lucky that we'd found our way to an excellent engineer who knew the company." The album was recorded over five months in 1983 at Castlesound Studios, which Malcolm had set up in 1979 in the former primary school building in the village of Pencaitland, east of Edinburgh. Living first in a rented flat in Edinburgh, and then later sleeping on Malcolm's floor when their money ran out, the band laboured over the album because all the sounds on the record had to be created and played physically. The band also had exacting standards and obsessed about every detail on the album: Malcolm recalled that "they were always particularly sensitive to not doing the wrong thing and making sure it had absolutely the right emotional impact: there were times when I'm sure everyone else felt something was done and then someone would throw a spanner in the works over some little thing". Release A Walk Across the Rooftops became the first album released on the