TINDERSTICKS

TINDERSTICKS (Olympia Theatre, Dublin)

THREE WORDS will tell you just how uncommonly fine this gig was, and they are: Stuart Staples smiled. There were mitigating factors: the mob was singing along with great gusto, it was way past midnight, he’d had more than his share of whiskey and water, he had, lest we forget, just sang his way through seventy minutes of a set that was nothing less than godlike – and then there was the incident with the bucket, about which I’ll let you wonder.

So the man who, legend has it, makes Mark Kozelek look like Ken Dodd on nitrous oxide had to stifle a grin. Sometimes everything’s just right. And it’s such a relief.

A confession: I’ve never completely trusted the Tindersticks. Not just because of the unsightly rush to hail them as saviours of the universe immediately on the release of their debut double, but because – though there’s no denying the grace and majesty of ‘Raindrops’, ‘Blood’, ‘No More Affairs’ and many, many more – I’ve never been able to rid myself of the gnawing suspicion that Stuart Staples is just playing out some kind of secondhand wounded crooner fantasy; learning about life from Leonard Cohen, then hitting the right notes, wearing the right suits with just the right expression of world-weariness, an exercise in form, meaning nothing.

This theory is, happily, so wide of the mark as to have gone out for a throw-in. Stuart stalks the stage like a man with an axe to grind, almost as if playing is a distraction that prevents him from dealing with all the stuff rattling around his head, and then remembers that the only way to deal with it is to release it, in our direction. His frailty during ‘Tiny Tears’ makes you shudder and the strange love of ‘Milky Teeth’ (“If there’s ever anyone else/I’ll understand, and kill him”) makes me laugh ’til my head hurts.

The band, too is a marvel, an eclectic cacophony that knows when to shut up, a group of very lucky – in the sense that talent is luck – men who can do no wrong. They play like angels, then grind like devils, and all points in between. Also, if I were capable of bearing children, I would want them to be Dickin Hinchcliff’s. Any woman that doesn’t want him is sick.

Before the show, the DJ played Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and it was the richest of ironies; if you don’t belong in the midst of this passion, fun and unruly cool, you don’t belong anywhere. The Tindersticks are home sweet home.

• Niall Crumlish