“I won’t let my love become my weakness”
As Stewart Staples repeats the refrain from ‘New World,’ the opening track from Tindersticks’ most recent album Soft Tissue, its paradox becomes clear. Despite several changes in personnel and formation, a temporary five-year hiatus from 2003, and Staples embarking upon a solo career during that same period, a career that now dates back more than 30 years is firm testament to their collective strength, passion, and endurance.
The band that formed in Nottingham in 1991 have now released 14 studio albums (plus many original soundtracks, primarily for French film director Claire Denis), though this evening they concentrate on the last couple of decades of their recording career.
It must be getting on for 20 songs into this evening’s immersive performance before ‘New World’ makes an appearance, a grand entrance at that but one that sadly also signals the end of the second set proper. It is ok though, there will be a three-song encore.
Long before then Tindersticks had already completed a short introductory set that included the songs ‘Willow’ and ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ both of which had remained mysteriously unreleased prior to the arrival of Past Imperfect: The Best of Tindersticks ’92 – ’21 album in 2022. And despite the clocks going back later tonight, these songs fitted perfectly the view that Tindersticks’ time will always be around twilight and always enveloped by a gathering gloom and feelings of deep melancholy.
Yet after a short intermission what ensues certainly begins to shake any such perception. By now Stewart Staples has discarded the chair upon which he had previously been sat and is now stood stage centre. “In an ill-fitting suit with something up his sleeve,” he breathes the words to ‘How He Entered’ from 2016’s The Waiting Room. He could well have been singing about himself albeit without any mention of his crumpled fedora hat.
And the music that follows after the break moves into another, even more powerful, even more dramatic dimension, not least on the material from Soft Tissue. ‘Nancy’ oozes potency and the indelible power of ‘Always a Stranger’ – possibly the stand-out song of the entire evening – serves as the perfect counterpoint to the brittle heartbreak of their preceding cover of the late American singer-songwriter Dory Previn’s ‘The Lady with the Braid.’
‘Always A Stranger’ sets in motion a noble run of yet three more tracks from Soft Tissue – ‘The Secret of Breathing’, ‘Turned My Back’ and ‘Don’t Walk, Run’ – a delightful sequence that firmly evidences Tindersticks enduring capacity to surprise as they move beyond the more hackneyed confines of despondency and despair, embracing stirring elements of Northern Soul, funk, and great optimism as they do so.
Photos: Simon Godley
