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Live Review
by SashaS
30-5-2003
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| Tindersticks' Stuart Staples in action |
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Live: Tindersticks
Royal Court Theatre, London
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Tindersticks’ magic notes on Sloane Square
Tindersticks have always chosen their concert venues carefully to make mere gigs into something special. Tonight is not an exception and it is the first-ever music show at this theatre. (The history otherwise remembers the theatre as the place where the revolutionary play by John Osbourne, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, premiered in 1956.) Thus, the most appropriate venue for this type of a performance, a recital almost.
Tindersticks are playing three shows in this intimate venue to promote their new album, ‘Waiting For The Moon’, and it is such a special occasion but you’d hardly know it if you were to rely upon the musicians’ reactions: there is a precious bit of banter from the stage, just waves of music from these six that simply enervate your senses.
‘Sticks lead into a land where little things like simple pop-songs are exiled. This is the music of the dark-corners of the heart, the intriguingly intoned songs about reality of (actual) dying, tragedy of loving and keeling over lost love. This is deeply ‘disturbing’ music that causes thawing all social barriers and you end up like an emotional wreck who is trying to “Say Goodbye To The City’ but it has a firm hold over the ‘break-up’.
Profoundly arranged and orchestrated with a style usually disassociated with your everyday-popsters, this is not miserable music, a sonic place where the pessimists can find sanctuary but the truest reflection of reality. What is more disturbing than the pain of unrequited love? The loss of it? Or, the final destination? One of the new songs, ‘4.48 Psychosis’, is titled and its lyrics based on the Sarah Kane’s final play before her suicide. The ‘Sticks’ most Velvet Undeground-ish moment ever!
Staples’s baritone moves from the Tom Waits’s deep-down South to ‘cheerful’ Leonard Cohen to dramatic Nick Cave, less emo-detached but more often in the thick of it á la Scott Walker… He shares vocals with violinist Dickon Hinchliffe who manages to sound even more deadpan than Staples. I wouldn’t like to call them phlegmatic performers but rEMOnstrating and projecting have never been quantities to concern the band members.
It might be smooth but they don’t make it easy on their fans either and some of the favourite songs are missing and loud calls for ‘My Sister’ go by without even a nod of ignoring it. But, when you have penned so many great songs and there are even more on the new disc – ‘Running Wild’, ‘’Until The Morning Comes’, ‘Sweet Memory’ and the title track – mixed with a cover of Lee Hazlewood’s obscurity ‘My Autumn’s Done Come’, you have do disappoint several fans. Even their three-song encore includes their own obscurity, ‘She’s Gone’, rather than ‘Tiny Tears’, for instance.
When you look around there are a plenty of examples of nu-metal, corpo-punk, emo-‘rockers’, guitar-pop is getting crowded but there is only one Radiohead, as well as Tindersticks. Shouldn’t we get out of the forest and start looking at the trees? Stuart Staples fronted the half-Nottingham half-London originating sextet that soars above all the Coldplays, Travis, Elbow and Doves clones combined!
Attributes like noble, elegant, obsessive-introspective, pensive, pastoral and passive even, fill one’s impression box all night long with the music’s pulling power that casts a spell over you. Forget Harry Porter, Tindersticks know magic, inside-out. And they are for real.
Tour dates:
30, 31 May - Royal Court Theatre, London
02 June - Queens Hall, Edinburgh
03 June - The Lowry, Manchester
04 June - City Varieties, Leeds
05 June - Old Market, Brighton
06 June - Arts Centre, Salisbury
07 June - St Georges, Bristol
08 June - Albert Hall, Nottingham
SashaS
30-5-2003
Tindersticks’ album ’Waiting For The Moon’ is released by 09 June 2003 by Beggars
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