Glasgow’s Blue Nile Group Won’t Go With the Flow : Pop: The trio is spreading its uncompromisingly honest approach to music in its first concert tour.

Singer Paul Buchanan was making an analogy between his band, the Blue Nile, and the Marx Brothers. But it was difficult to pick out just what he was saying through his thick Glasgow brogue.

“What we’re about is doing something genuine, for better or worse,” he seemed to say during a recent phone conversation from New York. “We feel like the Marx Brothers in an escapade, trying to find our own harps.”

A reference to Harpo’s featured instrument? That might make a certain amount of sense, but there really doesn’t seem to be much relationship between the Marxes’ madcap farces and the Blue Nile’s ethereal, somber, river-of-emotions music.

Questioned about the comment, Buchanan, 33, realized that he had been misunderstood. He wasn’t saying harps , but hearts --meaning the sweetness that underlies much of the Marx Brothers’ antics, especially Harpo’s.

Much to their surprise, the three members of the Blue Nile are finding their hearts in the show-business world of concerts. Essentially a studio entity, the group is on its first concert tour, including a show Friday at the Wadsworth Theater.

“I don’t think we’d ever imagined the warmth we’d get from people and the feedback,” Buchanan said. “It’s been completely uplifting. In a way it reminds us of the moment of the music’s inception. . . . After you make the records you stop regarding the songs as animate objects. But playing them in front of people, we feel them taking life again. The real good thing is to feel the blood flowing through them again--and through yourself.”

The feeling is particularly welcome following a tough period between the 1985 release of the band’s debut album, “A Walk Across the Rooftops,” and the recent follow-up, “Hats.”

The first album was something of an accident: Buchanan and his multi-instrumentalist friends Robert Bell and Paul Moore had worked in private to develop a unique musical voice, an example of which was used by a Glasgow audio equipment firm to test and demonstrate its equipment. That sample was heard by a producer who put the trio in touch with Britain’s Virgin Records, which signed the band to record an album. (A&M; Records picked up the album for U.S. release.)

But after the album’s warm, understated intensity found favor with critics and fans, the Blue Nile was faced with trying to make another album.

“Everyone was so good-intentioned, but everyone wanted us to make a record again at the drop of a hat,” the soft-spoken Buchanan said. “There was an incubation period that we tried to do without, but couldn’t. So the first year and a half consisted of exploring ideas. And we had some fairly sad things happen with our families and in our personal lives.”

But once the band got down to making the new record, it came together quickly. Upon its release, the acclaim from the first album carried over. At the same time, Rickie Lee Jones took the band under her wing, touting them in many interviews. Jones also was instrumental in persuading the band to play concerts, and invited them to join her for a couple of numbers during her show at the Wiltern Theatre earlier this year.

“She knew that it would some way break us of (our fear) of singing in front of people,” Buchanan said. “It was easy--just show up and walk on and sing a song or two. Helped us overcome the psychological barrier.”

Given the relative distance the Blue Nile has kept from pop-star glitz and glamour, another Hollywood analogy Buchanan offered seemed more apt than the one to the Marx Brothers.

“We tend to be like James Stewart or Henry Fonda,” he said. “There’s some hope there without having to surrender your way of doing things. We’re constantly invited to partake in vanity and selfishness, but we try to stay out of show business. I don’t want to turn the songs into a vehicle for a career. I don’t want to waste the magic of it by rubbing it too hard.

“I think that’s our claim to people’s attention and people will only be willing to listen to us as long as we stay true. To be honest, that’s where the hope and glamour is, in having kids and making somebody laugh and being in love and feeling that you’re special to somebody and seeing the sky.

“That’s why we distance ourselves. It’s not much of an achievement for three grown men, you know? But sometimes we stumble on saying that in our music, and that’s humbling.”