found that soul

We were always so intense/Out of control/Never understood/Never knew how to deal with it/Don’t believe/Don’t cherish/Strike a match/The thrill of having nothing/The smell of the flames…

Aggressive, almost monolithic heat, like someone’s left an oven door open. Early evening, and Brussels is masquerading convincingly as high-noon, midsummer Rome or Barcelona. The crowd who are here early for tonight’s Tindersticks performance, are variously drowsing in the intense, radiating heat outside, and, to borrow a very Tindersticky phrase, mooching around by the merchandise table within.

Pause to look at the rarities on offer here – a completist’s paradise of limited-edition vinyl, postcard collections, t-shirts depicting earlier releases and, in typical self-mocking Tindersticks fashion, boxer shorts with donkeys on them.

This four-day Tindersticks mini-festival – here in Le Botanique, a spectacular glass-and-steel arts centre flanked by curving gardens and miniature fountains, an oasis among the towering sheer-concrete expanses of Brussels’ city-centre architecture – this, thank God, is no Stuart Staples Lonely Hearts Club Band convention. It’s a celebration of the fact that Tindersticks, after some distinctly iffy moments over the last few years – not to put too fine a point on it – still exist.

Following a brief unhappy dalliance with a major label, a result of the merger mayhem of a few years ago, and after becoming bored with their own sound and trapped by their own iconography, Tindersticks have relocated their muse. Thus, this weekend, full of special one-off themed performances, DJ sets, Tindersticks-scored films and photo exhibitions, rather than being mawkish or nostalgic, feels forward-looking and celebratory.

After nearly deciding to end it, to strike the match, they’re still here; their new album Can Our Love… has them happier than they’ve been in years; the sun is shining, and the vibes are good. As they should be. After all, as Tindersticks tell us, this is also a birthday party. Many happy returns. Today, Tindersticks are ten.

Stuart Staples, after a decade, has recently awarded himself the job-description ‘singer.’ Not in the sense of ‘frontperson’ or, as he is the main lyric-writer, the Tindersticks mouthpiece-by-default; but singer. “Yeah, I’m starting to feel like one. Finally. Starting to,” he beams, with as much pride in his voice as he’ll have later when telling us of the birth of his fourth child. “As of four months ago. As of this record.” Why only so recently?

“There are a few songs on this record that are special,” he says, in his famously bassy murmur (in person, Staples is so very quiet that, over the course of our conversation, we will offer cigarettes throughout in a sneaky effort to bring the dictaphone ever nearer). “Like ‘Can Our Love…’ and ‘Sweet Release’,” he says, naming the two central songs on the new album. “I wanted, on this record, to find a way to sing that was simple and instinctive. To try to find something more honest, find a natural way of singing. And sometimes, with these songs, if it’s good, you can bring things – you can go somewhere more. I’ve kind of found a way of doing something that I don’t… really understand.”

And certainly this record marks a departure for Staples as a singer. On it, he explores ways of using his trademark low rumble that we haven’t quite heard before. Over the course of their previous four studio albums, his voice has had an endlessly mournful quality that lent it a bittersweet weight, that drew it downward even in the band’s happiest moments, like a heavy overcoat on a drowning man. Here, that weight is lessened, if not gone. ‘Tricklin’’ sees him whispering in upper registers, his voice gentle, nearly not alighting on the notes at all; and opening track ‘Dying Slowly’ finds him ‘singing out,’ to coin a phrase, with the impassioned fervour of a revivalist. Which, in a way, given how close Tindersticks came to calling it a day, is what he is.

All the same, though, anyone familiar with the shattered, sprawling orchestral beauty of Tindersticks’ records, or certainly with their famously visceral live performances, would perhaps imagine that the band have always been able to go beyond the cerebral, to tap into the deeper non-verbal parts of themselves, to ‘go somewhere more’ without ‘understanding’ it on a literal level. But they’re not quite talking about instinct versus intellectualisation: the problem, for Tindersticks these last few years, has been something much less complex, much closer to home. And when you listen to Stuart describe it, in his halting, near-inaudible baritone, it sounds like the spoken-word lyric of any number of Tindersticks songs about relationships going sour.

“Over the course of making those first three records,” he murmurs, “I suppose we were looking for something, finding out something, finding what we were as a band. But then, for a while, we stopped looking. We all slipped into roles. And by the time [third album] Curtains came out it felt distant, we had let it lose its edge. We were just playing the role. And people weren’t very happy. My role then [as lead singer] was more kind of like… filling in, filling the gaps that people leave. And this record [Curtains] left gaps. Because people weren’t happy, and weren’t so involved. And in the middle of it all, we were so focused on just getting this thing out.”

Dickon Hinchcliffe (violinist and arranger): “‘I think the biggest thing in the actual recording of ‘Can Our Love…’ is that we were determined we were all going to enjoy it. ’Cos the last two albums [Simple Pleasure and Curtains], really,” he shakes his head, “they were hard work. We had put such pressure on ourselves to kind of fulfil our… mission,” Dickon says ironically, “which was: we had this kind of idea, this sound, of the record we wanted to make. And with Can Our Love… we didn’t know, or care, what it was going to end up being like. We wanted the music to just flow from us as people, and just enjoy playing again. And we knew that if we did, that the album would show for itself, without us forcing it into something. In a way it felt like our very first record. It kind of still has some of that naïve, spontaneous vibe to it.”

It’s a very different animal to those early records though. In addition to the fact that it carries on from the new, more soul-influenced direction they embarked upon for Simple Pleasure, there’s a lot less battling, less soul-destruction, on Can Our Love… than on any of their previous work. There are still lovers’ insecurities, and a typical Tindersticky woebegone quality, but it’s generally about affairs that are working out, people who are in for the long haul, and who are trying to move forward.

“Yeah,” Dickon says, reservedly. “Possibly.”

This is not something you think about when you’re doing it…

“Not really, no. I think we’ve lost the kind of tortured element that has been in our work, even when it’s similar kinds of things that we’re saying. It’s kind of less self-conscious, now.”

How did that happen?

“Em, I think naturally, in one way, and also, we became aware of something – that we’d developed this sound, this style, this whole kind of way of making music, and we had pushed it to its very limits – a very kind of rich, heavy sound, which, you know, we quite liked, full of turmoil, lost. But we were just exhausted by it, drained by it. And as people we were changing as well. That’s why even Simple Pleasure was so different. It was like we made a conscious effort to make a different kind of record. We wanted to start from scratch. To be less theatrical, in a way.”

Theatrical. This reminds me of their fabled dark suits of olde, with which they accidentally scandalised the pop world nearly a decade ago. It was assumed to be some kind of deliberate sharp-dressing manifesto in the tradition of fellow doomed-romance-purveyors Nick Cave and Bryan Ferry, but was actually just a bit of good clean hurrah-we-can-afford-proper-suits fun.

“That’s exactly what it was,” laughs Stuart (very quietly). “We just wanted to look nice. We started out wearing Oxfam suits, the trousers were too short, the sleeves were too short…” Then,

“Now,” Stuart remembers, “we finally get a chance to afford to wear a proper suit, and we were like, great! That’s what we always wanted. And Timothy [Everest, their friend and tailor] really appreciated that, how excited we were.” And then, the suits became all that people could see. “The suits became uniforms,” Stuart continues, “they were like workers’ clothes. And we felt… trapped. That’s when we started wearing kind of ‘real clothing,’ and started trying to figure things out, how to get out of this trap, get somewhere more real…”

It’s when you duck out of the heat into the spare, wood-planked gallery for the photo exhibition that you remember what a family affair it’s been from the beginning, what a labour of friendship as well as love.

The exhibition, all shot by ‘unofficial’ band photographer Phil Nicholas over the last ten years, reads like an album of affectionate family snaps. There are photos of men in suits, and black shiny shoes, as their early song ‘Marbles’ has it; but there are also photos of disarrayed chipper tables, stuffed ashtrays and spent wine-bottles and, mostly, of a group of young men laughing, first in tattered swollen-couched flats, then in sharp suits, then grinning and squinting in the sun on skyscraper-rooftops, and eventually – in their most recent set of photographs – on a pier before a grey sky, in street-clothes and rain-gear, and (as on the sleeve of Can Our Love…) making new friends at an animal sanctuary in Devon.

The constant running through all of these is a clearly apparent, boyish camaraderie among the band members – which, in addition to their rediscovery of fresh musical pastures, turns out to be the main reason Tindersticks decided to stay together.

Dickon: “I’ve been walking around in [Le Botanique] this weekend, and... It’s kinda hard to describe what it feels like, really,” he muses. “But it’s been… Finally getting here, and seeing it, and doing these last two gigs – especially last night, with the string section, it’s felt slightly unreal… but it’s been great. It was a challenge we set ourselves to do, which we’ve always liked doing.”

Setting yourselves these challenges – gig series, collaborations, film scores, forays into new unfamiliar territory – are these kinds of things the reason you lot are still together?

“Yeah,” Dickon says decisively. “Apart from the fact that we still get on really well as friends, which would be the next biggest factor. ’Cos we’re not the kind of people who like to just repeat ourselves. We like to have a fresh challenge, something to work towards. Cos we’re kind of ambitious about what we do. And um, you know, I think we’ve been really lucky, ’cos when we started out, we just wanted to make music, we just wanted to do gigs, and then over the years, we’ve managed to do all kinds of other things, we’ve been able to… really have a go.”

The thrill of having nothing, as Stuart sings on ‘No Man In The World’: it’s only a thrill if you see it for the intoxicating, all-bets-are-off opportunity to start again that it is. Tindersticks understand; and a delicious new chapter in the band’s history awaits. Many happy returns: happy birthday and many more.