Smouldering Tindersticks

`Are you going to interview my daddy?" asks the little girl in the lobby of Jury's hotel, watched by her mother and baby brother. Certainly not, think I, looking at the happy family portrait of Stuart Staples' wife, daughter and baby boy. I'm here to meet a lonely, tortured soul who lives in a dusty loft, writing songs about lost love and faded dreams: a tall, thin, haunted creature who sings with Tindersticks, the most maudlin, majestic band ever to emerge from the musical wasteland of Nottingham. He can't possibly be your daddy.

But it's true - Stuart Staples, Northern England's answer to Nick Cave, is happily married with two kids, and he has brought the family along while he gives interviews about Tindersticks' latest album, Curtains. Listening to the dark, desolate songs on the band's first two albums you would peg Staples as a misanthrope, incapable of a relationship in the normal sense of the word, doomed to forever lament his tragic lot in life. And you couldn't be more wrong.

As we find our seats in the noisy lunch-time throng of Jury's, it's apparent that Staples is not only a handsome, strikingly louche figure, but he's also a contented person, and he wears the coy smile of someone who knows he's doing his best work ever. Tindersticks' latest album, Curtains, is a morose masterpiece, fragrant with flavours of love, longing and loneliness. It might be a more upbeat affair than before, but its jazzy, Latin rhythms are tempered with a resolute realism and a sense of wounded romanticism which cut right to the heart and soul.

Imagine the Cafe Orchestra fronted by Ian Curtis of Joy Division, and you might come close to the fine line which Tindersticks tread; on one side the light, aromatic melodies which fill the room like the scent of herbs, on the other, the heavy burden of emotional turmoil which can leave you feeling lost in a cold, empty mansion. It's a heady combination, and one which the six-piece band has been quietly honing for the past six years.

It's hard to hear Staples' soft-spoken voice over the harsh hubbub of Jury's, but it's easy to empathise with his quietly-delivered sentiments. Here he is, the man who can whisper the age-old woes of the inner psyche, yet outwardly he can play happy families with the ease of the unthinking.

"Nothing's ever what it seems, just as nothing is ever easy," offers Staples enigmatically, as he rolls the first of many cigarettes. "People believe that if you've got a family or something, that everything's easy, everything's straightforward. But nothing's ever easy or straightforward."

Like the making of Tindersticks' third studio album, which nearly spelt curtains for the band. Much of the album was mixed in Dublin's Windmill Lane Studios last summer, and I got my first sighting of the band one fine morning when I opened my curtains and saw the unmistakably gaunt face of Stuart Staples passing by my window. He was staying in a nearby townhouse, just a short walk from the studios, and he cut a formidable figure as he strolled purposefully on his way to completing Tindersticks' most satisfying work to date.

"It was somewhere we've always felt good," explains Staples, "And it was a studio that we liked; and I got so obsessive about making this record that for two weeks I was at the, studio at around half ten in the morning and finishing at three in the morning, walking back to the house and going to sleep, getting up in the morning and thinking, I'd like two pints of Guinness."

But though Tindersticks were supping from the flagon of Joyce's Dublin, they were by no means drowning their sorrows in a sea of stout. True, last year's sessions for Curtains were marked by a fair degree of conflict, but there was also a generous serving of . . . fun. "We've always had fun making our records," asserts Staples, directly contradicting the emotional evidence of the band's sombre style. "I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. An idea doesn't have to be one or the other. I think those two things can be totally intertwined.

"In the band, the way we work, it may be one person's idea, and the other people have fun with it, but you just know when you hear it that it feels right. It feels like the right thing. But I think you have to have an ability to step back. I think everything means a lot - it's just that sometimes, even with the lyrics, you can have fun with it as well, sort of step back and see some things as ridiculous sometimes."

There's a sharp sense of the ridiculous on some of the tracks from the new album, especially the ironic, iconoclastic Ballad Of Tindersticks, where Stuart recounts a year of rock monster self-indulgence that would make Spinal Tap break wind with envy. At least that's what it sounds like to me, but Stuart is not so sure. "I dunno; on the surface it's one thing, but to us it's just about losing yourself, losing your sense of what's important. It's losing a sense of what things give you real joy, rather than just bullshit and things that are blase and superficial.

"I think when we started the band we had this ready-made attitude. We never talked about anything. We didn't sit down and have this plan of what we were going to sound like or what we were trying to do. It's just that, when it became like the six people, it just had this kind of strength. We just went on from there."

Tindersticks first gathered together in their native Nottingham in 1992, and their second single, Marbles, caught the attention of the music press. The band's reticence and self-effacement was a fascinating change from the idle boasts and sloganeering of most other British bands. The first album, simply titled Tindersticks, was named "Album Of The Year" by Melody Maker, and the band's relocation to London ensured that they were within mumbling distance of the UK music biz hub. It also meant that they were just a tube trip away from gentlemen's outfitter Timothy Everest, who dresses the band in its trademark suits.

The second album, also titled Tindersticks, featured such low-key gems as No More Affairs, Tiny Tears and Travelling Light, a duet with Carla Torgerson from The Walkabouts. As word-of-mouth grew, the band began to play ever more memorable concerts, sometimes with a 24-piece orchestra in tow. One of these emotionally-charged shows is captured on The Bloomsbury Theatre 12.3.95.

Bathtime was the first splash from Tindersticks' latest album, and it seeped into the UK Top Twenty, becoming the band's first bona fide hit single. The album didn't disappoint, either, and its 15 songs sweep through many stylistic vistas, led by the piano playing of Dave Boulter and the violin strains of Dickon Hinchliffe. In their dust-grey suits the six musicians look like a Left Bank version of Reservoir Dogs, and these dour Northerners have come to embody aloof European cool. They've even recorded a duet with film star Isabella Rossellini, which should cast its continental allure some time next autumn.

Much of Tindersticks' creative force derives from the fact that the band members were all close friends and could relate to each other on a personal as well as a professional level. During the making of Curtains, however, both personal and professional relations within the band took a severe beating - to the point where Tindersticks teetered on the verge of breaking up.

Stuart explains: "It's like gradually, having been together for five-and-a-half years, you just feel as if so many things have been chipped away from you. And then you have to say, why am I doing this? What are we going to get out of it? And everybody kind of had to do that and find out what they were doing.

"We've always had this thing where what we do is so important to us. The actual recording and the playing live are like secondary to us all writing songs together. And it's just losing track of what you do - you know, the essence of what you do. There was one point when we were ready to walk away from it."

Feelings smouldered so much in the Tindersticks' camp, apparently, that the band was almost prepared to abandon the sessions for the new album and jack it in altogether. "The only power you've got is to be able to say, I'm not gonna do this any more," reckons Stuart. "That's the only power anybody's got."

It wasn't quite the same as the Oasis near-split of last autumn - the tabloids didn't exactly fall over themselves to cover the story - but for the six members of Tindersticks, it was as big a crisis as they had ever encountered in their entire careers. In the end, everything was resolved, and Stuart believes it has made the band even stronger. "Without getting down there, it wouldn't have got back up. It was getting to a point where it could either stop or it could get so much better. But it couldn't carry on. And now, it's the best time to be in this band. Without that low, we wouldn't have re-evolved."

Tindersticks play the Temple Bar Music Centre on Friday 22nd August. The album, Curtains, is out now on This Way Up Records.