“Music should always be fun,” declares Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples. “There should always be a sense of discovery. No matter what you’re writing about or how you’re feeling, if you haven’t got that sense of discovery I don’t think you’re going to make something great.”

First formed in Nottingham in the early ‘90s, the band – Staples, David Boulter (keyboards), Neil Fraser (guitar), Earl Harvin (percussion) and Dan McKinna (bass) – will be celebrating their 20th anniversary next year, and have produced no shortage of great moments throughout their career.
Over the course of nine albums their sound has definitely matured, though it has never lost that trademark sombreness. Mostly this is down to Staples’ distinctively melancholic baritone. However, the singer denies that they’re a miserable bunch generally.
“We have our own sense of humour!” he protests. “I don’t think we’re ever dour. But I do think playing music is something that means a lot to us, so over the years people might have mistaken seriousness for dourness. Especially when we play live, I wanna be true to that.”
Although the band broke up for a while in the early noughties, with Staples recording a couple of well-received solo albums, Tindersticks have been increasingly progressive and experimental since their reformation. What brought the band back together?
“The thing that brought me back with Neil and David was they really wanted to make something with the band and I was kind of I suppose slightly apprehensive. But then it transpired that we got together for a weekend and something started to happen, some ideas started to come through. So we arranged another weekend, and then another, and then it just kind of grew from there. That was in 2006 and it’s still growing, and it still feels that way.
“When you’re in a situation like that, when you’re making music in a way that feels kind of progressive every time you get together, you can’t really argue with that. And I can’t argue with it. I’ve just been enjoying the music we’ve been making over the last four or five years.”
They’ve certainly been a lot more diverse in recent times. Their soundtrack work for director Claire Denis resulted in an acclaimed series of cinematic live shows, and culminated in the making of their recently released The Something Rain album. More unusually, they also composed the installation soundtrack for the In Flanders Fields war museum in Ypres.
“In Flanders Field was a commission to write the music for a museum – a static space,” he explains. “It was exciting. I think gradually over the years you’ve got to find different things to do and you’ve almost got to challenge yourself in a different way. Otherwise you get stuck into that rut of making an album and touring it. That can kind of get you down, but if you can break that up and do different things, it can certainly keep you fresh and take you to different places in your music.”
Released last February, The Something Rain is the band’s most successful album in years, even garnering a rare five-star review in German Rolling Stone, who described it as “a mind-blowing poetic masterpiece.”
“The album started with an instrumental from David that didn’t make the album in the end, but it kind of set us on a course. When I heard it, it really made me want to make something different. With hindsight now, particularly with the opening track ‘Chocolate’, I think the album had so much to do with our time in Nottingham in the mid-’80s, really, before we left. The musical sound and the way of thinking about music has so much to do with our time there. It’s kind of a homage to the musical environment, but we didn’t realise that at the time.”
Although the music business has changed utterly since the band’s inception, Staples maintains that the decline in album sales globally hasn’t really made a huge difference to them.
“We never made money on albums anyway! So it hasn’t really affected us. The way the music business was structured back then meant that we took an advance that allowed us to live and concentrate on the music, but the albums were kind of engineered never to recoup. So you were always feeling like you were in the pocket of a major record company. That hasn’t really changed.
“For all of the way the industry has changed so much, fundamentally we make something. We’re not in the business of selling things that other people make. We actually create things. We’re making things from ideas that didn’t exist before, and we have to survive off that. And we’ve been doing it for quite a while now.”

The Something Rain is out now on Lucky Dog Records.