Tindersticks display class with a full orchestra for pop that macerates the chart-bull

How to describe beauty is a question that has puzzled many a bigger braniac but I’ll offer me sixpence worth: it is something like taking notes in the dark; you can’t see what you are actually writing but the feelings run off paper. That’s what Tindersticks are, a band that refuses to be tied down to any category, any genre. At the time when emo-rock is all the rage they’ve manage to stay away from it all, on a lonely path that spells – individualistic passion for good tunes.

Noble, elegant, smart, soft and yet powerful are attributes coming to mind when Tindersticks music is in the full flow. The set knows to pick up tempo and deliver a knockout countdown and yet it mostly trawls through the deepest emotional colours of the grand pain conveniently known as – living. T-sticks can toy with The Blue Nile-type of pop-funk, heartbreakingly croon in the Scott Walker-stylee and hit the dirt-low of the Tom Waits calibre. With such mastery to appear so easy.

This is sophisto-rock, suave offering for the mature of feelings and not an upstart version of melancholy or quasi-miserabalism. Songs you need to listen to and the 5 thousand present do it in revered silence, dotting on every lyric, every single note, which is then greeted with rapturous uproar. And there is a welter of tunes to go nuts over, such an assorted and dramatic soundarama.

Perhaps the 15-strong backing orchestra wasn’t much conducive to onstage banter, and Stuart Staples has never been the most loquacious frontman, but tonight he appears to be even more reticent. ‘People Keep Comin’ Around’ and ‘Sweet Release’ are the rare urban vignettes that are name-checked but everybody knows most of the set-list by heart, from ‘Tiny Tears’ via ‘Little Sister’ to ‘Marbles’…

T-sticks create emo-elevating songs that are priceless. What this lot possesses in shoals is an aesthetic that borders on magic. This is how you take notes in the dark, bitter-sweetly.