Sea of tranquility

The UK music scene of ten years ago was an odd old place. The gathering of the anti-criminal justice tribes was propelling the underground into the mainstream, while the post-Nirvana fall out was still rampant and Britpop was just around the corner. Into this melting pot came a band from Nottingham called Tindersticks, who released the extraordinary ‘Marbles’ and then followed it up with an equally remarkable debut album, both of which sent the critics into a frenzy. And they’ve done pretty much the same ever since, releasing record after record of intelligent, well crafted and slightly dark music culminating with this year’s Waiting For The Moon – all the time trying to recapture the magic of that debut. This we know because Stuart Staples – band singer, public face and perhaps the only man to make a denim suit look good – is sat in front of us in a Dublin hotel and telling us so.

“The first album was made in an unconscious kind of way. We had no idea what was going on, we were a loose outfit,” he proffers. “We’d only made our own records in our kitchens; we didn’t really know what we were about. All we did was go into a studio for three weeks and try anything and everything that came to mind, we didn’t feel that we had an audience to live up to. We all had an idea of what the band was but it wasn’t until that point and the making of that record that it became something that was us. After that you get an audience and you perhaps become more self-aware, more guarded, more cynical. I suppose with this record we tried an approach that was more to do with being spontaneous, doing stuff in the right place and right time. That has enabled us to be closer to what we actually are.”

Given that they were (and to be honest probably still are) such a musical anomaly, were there any bands that Staples felt a kinship with in those early days?

“When we started off and made our own records, there was a lot of energy in London and a lot of people doing small things, happy to make a seven inch single with this band or that band. There were people around like Stereolab, like Huggy Bear and later Belle & Sebastian who have also done their own thing. And bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth, who maybe people would think would have nothing to do with a band like us, they were making great records that helped you feel like you were in a certain place.”

Glance at the gig archive on the band website and it’s noticeable that almost as soon as that first record was released the band were touring throughout Europe. To this day they are seen as a group with more European influences than most, although Stuart doesn’t quite see it that way.

“I don’t think that it’s about influences, I think it’s about what you want from music. We’ve always been able to go and play in places where people might not entirely understand the words but there’s something in our music that goes beyond that. It’s as much to do with the music and how you sing it, rather than what you’re actually saying. Looking back, I think we crossed a lot of boundaries. It was the first time that any of us had actually travelled, so there was a real excitement whereas a lot of English people are very superior. The music industry is very arrogant, everybody wants English bands to go and conquer America but it’s never been about that to us.

“Young people in Germany over the past couple of generations have had something to deal with and a reason to look at themselves, to define how they actually feel about things,” he continues. “Being English has never allowed itself any kind of shame in any kind of way. There’s still this thing inside where they think they’re the centre of the universe. I think that if England relaxed and realised that it was just a little country doing its own thing but had a lot to offer it would be a lot better place.”

These regular jaunts to some of the most glamorous cities in the world were in sharp contrast to the singer’s formative years, spent in an area that still looked to the coal industry to support the community.

“Myself, Neil and David all had a similar kind of upbringing,” he remembers. “When I was at school, the collier was on the doorstep, towering over you. Most of the people there planned nothing more than just walking across the road. They couldn’t really see beyond the end of their street.”

And how did these people react when the band returned from London with the wordy, portentous Tindersticks album?

“We’re playing in Nottingham on this tour, for the first time in eleven years,” he ventures, as if that says it all. “We went there when the first album came out and it was very odd. Half the people are great, pleased that you’re doing what you want to do and half of them begrudge the fact that you left.”

So if they have finally matched their wondrous first offering (and Waiting For The Moon is a fine, fine record), does this mark the closing of a Tindersticks’ chapter? Maybe.

“When we made Curtains, we knew that it was the end of something and we had to wrench ourselves away from that and make music in a different way. This feels like the end of something as well but we all feel relaxed as to what happens next. We’re not scratching our heads as to what we should do now, whatever will happen will happen. When you’ve been in the same band with the same people for a while, you can feel the boundaries of what we can do, I can feel the boundaries of how I can sing. These last two records have been pushing against that and we’ve got to a point where we feel there’s something special between the six of us and it can go wherever it wants to go. We don’t feel the walls anymore.”