Night by Night only played "twice, maybe three times" in it short existence. The band struggled to retain a settled line-up and, by 1981, Buchanan, Bell and Moore were the only remaining members. They decided not to recruit anybody else, trading in a guitar for an effect pedal and borrowing an old drum machine that only played Hispanic American music rhythms. Buchanan later recalled, "We went and gigged, because we needed the money, we'd do gigs where we'd do cover versions with the cassette of Latin American rhythms. And we were terrible. But we picked songs that were so completely durable and well known that people recognized them. No matter how badly we mangled them." Renaming themselves the Blue Nile (after the title of the 1962 book by Alan Moorehead), the group managed to raise enough money to record and release its first single, "I Love This Life", on their own Peppermint Records label. Only a limited number were produced, but one found its way to RSO Records via their friend and engineer Calum Malcolm. Malcolm had been a member of short-lived Edinburgh punk band The Headboys who had released their records on the RSO label, and he still had contacts with the company. RSO licensed the single for distribution, but almost as soon as the record was released RSO went bankrupt and was absorbed into the PolyGram recording company, and the single consequently disappeared. A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982–1984) Undaunted by this setback, they continued to play gigs around Glasgow, starting to write their own songs alongside the cover versions they were playing. Having no drummer and with limited musical ability, particularly in Buchanan's guitar playing (he later admitted that "we could play a little, but I was the worst by a long way"), the newly formed Blue Nile adopted an atmospheric, electronic approach primarily out of pragmatism. The band also made the most of their imagination, thrift and mechanical ingenuity. Buchanan recalled, "PJ had bought a tray from a waiter. It was made of zinc and it made a good noise when you hit it. We sampled it and PJ made a pad to trigger it from for £3. It was all very primitive back then — you had to hit it about two seconds before you wanted the sound to appear in the song." The most commonly told story about the Blue Nile is that in