Tindersticks rekindled

The excellent Falling Down A Mountain is the second long-player Tindersticks have produced since the ensemble reconvened in 2007, following frontman Stuart Staples’s brief but respectable two-album solo stint. Now domiciled in rural France rather than dingy London, he is, it appears, still feeling the benefits of working with a group again.

“I think it showed me how much I missed it,” he chuckles. “I’d had enough of doing everything!”
Like the Bad Seeds, the Tindersticks collective have benefitted rather than suffered from being scattered across the continent. When they rendezvous for recording or tour rehearsals now, it’s all business.
“Because it’s an effort to get together I don’t think people turn up here to shrug their shoulders,” Staples says. “They want to make something. I remember the years in London we had our own rehearsal space and we’d meet up there and do anything to not play music. It’s the opposite to that. And it’s such a different thing to have an idea for a song and throw it into a group of people and see what happens, there’s something more mysterious and exciting about it in that way.”
The proof of that pudding is in the new album’s title tune, which evokes urban free jazz and chic French New Wave film soundtracks (specifically Miles’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud score for Louis Malle). Unsurprisingly, the finished track has its genesis in a two-take improvisation dominated by trumpeter Terry Edwards.
“It’s a different way of writing for me,” Staples testifies. “That sound is the sound of our studio, that and the last song, ‘Piano Music’. Just before finishing this album we made a film soundtrack for Claire Denis called White Material, and that was the freest abstract music we’ve ever made. I think a feeling of that, and being in this room together, carried on into the recording. It’s only a few microphones – it was more about recording the room than the sound of the instruments.”
Falling Down a Mountain also features guitar and vocal contributions from Dubliner David Kitt.
“It’s been ten years since we first asked him to support us, when Small Moments came out,” Stuart recalls. “He had been around so much and supported us on the last part of the Hungry Saw tour, it was just a natural progression. We were thinking and talking about the songs, playing them in dressing rooms, and he was joining in. He just brought something different to the record, and it felt important.”
The album also features another perfectly unlikely collaborator in the form of the divine Ms Mary Margaret O’Hara, who duets with Staples on the oddball doo-wop nugget ‘Peanuts’.
“We played in Toronto last year,” he explains, “and at that time I was trying to finish off the words for it, and she came to the show and we got talking and it was like one of those coincidences that was meant to be. She liked the song and then five months later I was back in Toronto recording it with her. I’m happy with the song but maybe even happier with the experience of spending some time with her and getting this thing done.”
Was she very different to record than other singers?
“She’s just very... free I suppose, with her voice. Trying to get her to sing the same thing twice was pretty difficult, but we got there in the end!”
Another notable contributor is Jo Fraser, whose flute is woven throughout the demonic Spanish taps of ‘She Rode Me Down’.
“Some great flute playing,” Stuart affirms. “I pushed her to solo all the way through it, just go for it. It was a good moment. Songs like that, with the hand-claps, or the singing on ‘Harmony Around My Table’, it was just about guys singing together, it wasn’t trying to be some kind of harmony section, it was just about giving in to that feeling – as many different sounding voices as possible. It grew into something more complicated, but we tried to maintain that feeling without making it slick and layered.”
No danger of that. The current contender for this writer’s favourite tune on the new record is ‘Black Smoke’, an end-of-the-world soul testimonial in the grand 60s pop-baroque vein.
“Recording that song and the one after it, ‘No Place So Alone’, it was a great feeling to just totally cut loose and feel this kind of abandonment,” Stuart recalls. “It was the first time I felt that in a long time, especially in the studio. I think the way we approached the record was, ‘If this moment works, great, but if it doesn’t we’re not going to worry about it too much’. With ideas like ‘Black Smoke’ there was a kind of freedom just to let loose and see how it felt afterwards.”
Well, if you’re going to do that Biblical gospel apocalypse thang, you might as well go in hard.
“I had a Catholic upbringing, so it probably makes it a bit easier for me!”