Tindersticks
The Hungry Saw
(Constellation Records)

Cut to the chase, to the present, to the bone. THE HUNGRY SAW - the first Tindersticks album in five years - finds the newly stripped-down band sounding not only hungry, but lean and thrilled again. The grand melancholy and gentle humour are still abundantly present, but there’s a renewed energy, an appetite for spontaneity. Stuart Staples, buzzing, is looking forward, not back. “You’ve just got to be true to the things that move you, that drive you to make things.”

YESTERDAY’S TOMORROWS

The old begat the new. After playing a Don’t Look Back show at the end of 2006 which honoured their hugely original and influential early work, Tindersticks felt a sense of closure. They reassessed their position, their motivations. “I felt the best way the band could have a future was to release the nostalgia, to let it go,” muses Stuart, now a resident of France, as he enjoys an old-fashioned pint on a visit to London. “We had to shake things up and move into the new place where we are now. That evening proved a real catalyst, gave us all a kick. It made us go: what are we doing and why are we doing it? For me, one of the things the new record’s got that I haven’t felt for a while is a freshness, with everyone involved pushing for something, wanting something, allowing new possibilities and mutations. There‘s something beating in the middle of it. It doesn‘t feel smaller to me - it feels bigger, richer.”

Since 2003’s Waiting For The Moon, the Nottingham-formed Tindersticks have been effectively on a hiatus. Stuart released two intriguing solo albums, and left his adopted manor of South East London to relocate to France with his wife and children. There, they set up Le Chien Chanceux studio in his new home, and in this informal, conducive atmosphere the revamped Tindersticks recorded what became The Hungry Saw. The sessions were unlike any the band had previously known. There were hard choices; then there was easy inspiration. The bulk of recording came in a breakneck “blast“ of just eight days (with strings and brass added later).

Tindersticks, having by necessity swelled and expanded over more than a decade - this, remember, is an entity that from humble, soft-spoken origins rose to achieving everything from playing the Royal Albert Hall to duet-ing with Isabella Rossellini - now consist of the three original members: vocalist Stuart, guitarist Neil Fraser and keyboard player David Boulter. Perhaps Tindersticks had become too big a beast. “It always had to be fed - with ideas, with money. But the biggest thing was it became difficult not to fall into specific roles within the six people. It’s hard to break out of them. It’s as if I felt I was writing songs to fit a specific shape. Now, making changes has meant keeping the feeling but looking at it from new angles. We got down to the true essence of why we made music in the first place. With this record, I know we’ve done some great stuff, we’ve really pushed it.”

THE TURNS WE TOOK TO GET HERE

Tindersticks never anticipated that their eponymous 1993 debut album would gather such attention. Album of the year in several publications, it introduced us to their dark, whirling, genre-mixing world of urban angst and wry candid smiles. “A web of wishes and wounds, a wonderful whispering gallery,” wrote this reviewer. Others eulogised “a feel of rain-wet cobblestones and French cigarettes”, and amid the cinematic and claustrophobic found something “sprawling, ambitious, romantic and spooky”. Songs like “City Sickness”, “Jism”, “Marbles” and “The Not Knowing” brimmed with honesty and passion that offered a grown-up alternative to the chirpy parochial indie-pop prevalent at the time. Hearing Stuart’s bluesy baritone and straining for comparisons, people came up with Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Scott Walker: the poster-boys for not grinning all the time, or, as it might be called, “common sense.” John Barry and Lee Hazelwood were also name-checked.

The second album - also, perversely, eponymous - built on those solid, flamenco-hearted foundations in ‘95, with songs like “Tiny Tears” and “No More Affairs” standing out. One colourful description hailed it as “a ghost train approaching the embers of an emerald city.”

1997’s Curtains got sexy in “Don’t Look Down,” and “The Ballad Of Tindersticks” found Stuart muttering (and we quote): “When do you lose the ability to step back and get a sense of your own ridiculousness? They're only songs...we are artists, we are sensitive and important...we nod our heads." It was an indication of how uncomfortable Tindersticks were with all the acclaim and press fever. “It was all so crazy around it, it took me by surprise,” Stuart reflects benignly now. “I never got to appreciate the early albums. They transcended themselves before we’d stepped up a level into this new unknown place. I still don’t know if people 'got' it, or whether they just got what they wanted from it. I was happy with the music, but less happy to be in front of people, and I think that added to the 'miserable' tag. We never saw ourselves as that. We felt under siege.”

1999’s Simple Pleasure proved to be arguably their most honed, heartbreaking work yet, with “I Know That Loving” bringing in shades of gospel and a smart sensitive cover of Odyssey’s “If You’re Looking For A Way Out” revealing a commanding grasp of the soul idiom. “That album was about breaking things down and starting from year zero…soul music was something we all felt inside us”. The subsequent Can Our Love… (2001) continued to fuse the more emotive of genres, always both pouring on the pain (“Tricklin’) and giving you a compensatory, knowing hug (“Chilitetime”).

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

After Waiting For The Moon came the sea change. First, Stuart moved to France. “The thing I really needed was space. I never had a “dream” to live in rural France, but my wife and I had a feeling of being hemmed-in in London…in our studios, even in the streets. Of course you gain one thing, you lose another. But the sense of space has changed a viewpoint within me. When I wrote “Say Goodbye To The City” for Waiting For The Moon, it was almost as if it said to me: OK, it’s time to move on. And I feel now that change is a positive thing. Rather than being stuck in a certain way of working, in certain relationships in the band, in familiar spaces, it’s now: all those things don’t exist any more. We’re not trapped. Everything feels much more fragile. But when it hits and comes together, it’s really strong.”

The Hungry Saw’s title track is a devilishly addictive, sweetly sinister rumble, laced with unnerving imagery. Stuart emphasises that “There’s a kind of writing that you have little control over. But as far as I can understand that song, it’s to do with the relationship between wanting to make things and wanting to destroy things. It’s about the urge to break beautiful things into pieces.” He adds that the central section of the album - from “The Hungry Saw” through to “All The Love” - is full of songs where: “I can’t look at those and say I totally understand why I wrote them. They’re intangible…like in dreams, hard to grasp. At the same time, I find them the most fascinating.”

“I‘d say ‘Boobar’ is about a loss of innocence, and ‘Mother Dear’ is about somebody making you feel better after a nightmare. At least those are the initial settings: for me it’s more about seeing where it takes me, not over-thinking it. Then Neil and David, Thomas and Dan then Lucy and Terry, respond to those feelings, and what they do makes another sense of it…”

The intensely moving “The Other Side Of The World” aims for a “sea-scape” effect, while “Flicker Of A Little Girl” is “perhaps about my wife or perhaps about my daughter. It‘s about trust, about being able to look after something precious. But if there‘s a running theme, it‘s about here, it‘s about now.”

Praise is heaped on drummer Thomas Belhom (a soloist who’d never played with a band before) and bassist Dan McKinna, as well as the glorious contributions from strings arranger Lucy Wilkins and brass man Terry Edwards. Stuart feels his solo albums gave him a chance to crystallise what he desired from making a band record. “It’s to do with everybody in the room, and what makes that special. Everybody‘s ideas and opinions are important, it‘s not pre-determined. We all change totally when it‘s a Tindersticks record! Everybody steps up and puts their mark on it.”

“Releasing this album, after we’ve been alone with it for so long, feels great and worrying and frightening and exciting,” muses Stuart. “Tindersticks now feels not like the conclusion of something; it feels like the start of something.” They’re beginning again. See the light.

Chris Roberts, 2008

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